


How Cosmic

by BabyRodent



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Action/Adventure, Gen, Kidnapping, Psychological Trauma, Suspense, Torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-07
Updated: 2014-05-18
Packaged: 2018-01-14 21:31:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 31,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1279600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BabyRodent/pseuds/BabyRodent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>While returning from a mission in Berlin with his team, Agent Coulson received news that any uncle would dread: his niece, Renee, was kidnapped by Centipede. With time running out and his calm bringing forth a storm, Coulson would now face a dilemma to risk the lives of his team and a new member...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Kidnapped

**Author's Note:**

> So this is the first chapter of my next work, which is based off of "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.", but I've always wanted to see if Coulson had any family of his own. Yes, they might not be agents like him, but it's a food for thought.

The sounds of keys clicked with an echo in the library as a young 18-year-old college student with dark hair in a ponytail and brushed-away bangs covering a bit of her forehead, gray eyes, and a casual outfit of a light blue with a large white star T-shirt with a jacket, jeans, and sneakers was typing up an essay for one of her classes. She wanted to look her best for the day, though it is typical with her uncle being a government agent of sorts, after all. Said uncle was outside of the library in his red, shiny, mid-life crisis car that he had named “Lola”. Renee Coulson knew what her uncle was like—calm, collected, always having a sense of humor—but she was aware of his status as a S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent and how he would be busy with his work from time to time, something that she was concerned about. She remembered the day that he nearly died before the Invasion of New York and how the Agents were asked to keep watch over her in case the aliens would go after her next; the day that she saw her uncle again on life support and read him one of his collectable and vintage “Captain America” comic books when he was waking up; the day where he began to walk again; the day where he returned to work as if nothing had ever happened. All in a year. During the time, she was in class in her old high school when she got the call and was excused out of class and to where her uncle was at. She graduated once life returned to normal, but she couldn’t get the image of her own uncle dying. Too much to truly bear.

These days, she was back into the groove and well on her way to finals before spring break for a few weeks. Her assignment was to discuss on the matters of business and both pros and cons of being in business. The topic she had to choose what the type of careers one would take and the amount of time needed to complete proper training. It was something that her uncle was generous enough to suggest when she first mentioned it.

These days, it was nothing more than a few words away from getting a good grade in her class and it was crucial to her.

“How long have you been on the computer, ma’am?” the librarian asked Renee as she paused and looked up at him.

“For almost an hour—I’ll be finished, though, in a few minutes,” she responded to him after checking the time on the taskbar of the computer. “I just need to finish this up first.”

“All right, then, you get another five minutes, but that’s it,” the librarian spoke with a nod before walking away as to not ask her more.

With that, Renee began to finish typing her essay and clicked “Print” after saving it, to which five pages began to print out from the printer. She leaned forward with her elbows on the desk in front of the keyboard and watched her essay being printed out in completion. However, as she saved the essay onto her flash drive, she stopped and noticed the word “centipede” in a folder. Curiosity peaked within her, seeing that she’s never seen it before, and she cruised the arrow on the screen to the folder, clicking on it twice for it to pop up. The screen went dark, much to her puzzlement, but then a menu of files popped up on the screen in green letters. She found that there was nothing to ask her for a password, for her name, for anything. Just a menu. That’s it.

She carefully read it as followed as she leaned in a little closer to the screen with a raised eyebrow:

 

WELCOME TO PROJECT CENTIPEDE: THE FUTURE AWAITS

 

>STARTING SEQUENCE

 

>CODE 95694942502 ACTIVATED

 

>CURRENT LOCATION VERIFIED

 

>APPROVED AND ETCHED IN

 

>CURRENT USER IDENTIFIED

 

>APPROVED AND ETCHED IN

 

>CURRENT TIME VERIFIED

 

>APPROVED AND ETCHED IN

 

>FINALIZING SEQUENCE

 

>SEQUENCE COMPLETE

 

 

PROJECT CENTIPEDE - TOP SECRET

 

CENTIPEDE IS DESIGNED TO CREATE AND REFORM HUMANITY WITH SUPERHUMAN STRENGTHS UNCOVERED. EVER SINCE THE INVASION OF NEW YORK, MANKIND WILL BE SUBJECTED TO THE TRUTH. NO COVERUPS FROM THE GOVERNMENT. NO SECRETS FROM MULTIPLE, OPPOSING AGENCIES. JUST THE TRUTH. WITH EACH POWER GIVEN TO MAN, POWER IS UNLIMITED AND THE FUTURE WAITS FOR EVOLUTION.

 

>HISTORY

 

>LIST OF MEMBERS

 

>PURPOSE

 

>LIST OF SERUMS

 

>BASES

 

>RULES

 

>LIST OF ENEMIES

 

>LIST OF MISSIONS

 

>PUNISHMENTS

 

>EXPERIMENTS

 

>MICHELLANOUS

 

>COMMENTS

 

Renee didn’t clicked on each article, thinking that it was probably a crazy roleplay group, reading each file name with furrowed eyebrows in confusion, before trying to click out of the black screen with little avail. It wouldn’t let her out of the folder, no matter how hard she tried. Renee thought that it was some sort of sick joke, not knowing that the makers of the file were trolls or hackers. However, with one last attempt, the files within the file “centipede” itself began to download into her flash drive. She tried to reverse it, but it was too late. She knew that if she told her uncle about this, he would be pissed. Okay, she rarely saw him pissed, but then there was “the calm is before the storm” and Coulson was the epitome of that expression.

 

NOW DOWNLOADING: 10%

 

NOW DOWNLOADING: 15%

 

She gulped with nervousness when she read the black screen with the green words say this. She figured that this was a mistake.

 

NOW DOWNLOADING: 20%

 

NOW DOWNLOADING: 25%

 

Yep, this was a mistake. A big one.

 

NOW DOWNLOADING: 30%

 

NOW DOWNLOADING: 35%

 

NOW DOWNLOADING: 40%

 

NOW DOWNLOADING: 45%

 

NOW DOWNLOADING: 50%

 

NOW DOWNLOADING: 55%

 

NOW DOWNLOADING: 60%

 

NOW DOWNLOADING: 65%

 

NOW DOWNLOADING: 70%

 

NOW DOWNLOADING: 75%

 

NOW DOWNLOADING: 80%

 

NOW DOWNLOADING: 85%

 

NOW DOWNLOADING: 90%

 

NOW DOWNLOADING: 95%

 

NOW DOWNLOADING: 100%

 

DOWNLOADING COMPLETE.

 

Then the blue screen with the normal folders returned, except that the “centipede” folder was nowhere to be seen, as if it was never there. She stared at the computer screen in speechless shock, trying to comprehend on what the hell just happened. It felt unreal, almost sci-fi movie-like.

Renee exhaled with anxiety as she leaned back against the chair, her hand on her face to cover her eyes in embarrassment. She could not believe that it just happened. She kept muttering to herself with embarrassment what an idiot she was to do that. But she had to take the flash drive in the library PC out before the librarian would approach her about her time on the computer, as well as staple her essay together. She then placed her essay and her flash drive into her folder, then put the folder back into her backpack, and made her way out of the library, where her uncle was waiting outside for her in “Lola”.

Phil Coulson, the everyman that’s seen all things not every day occurring, with thinning hair and blue-gray eyes as well as a dark suit with a tie, kept his sunglasses on to hide his identity from disguised enemies. He was aware that, with its perks to being an S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, the job also came with consequences as well. He would have to risk dying again, getting captured by enemies, losing his co-agents, and putting his niece into danger as well. The last bit, however, is something that he didn’t want to experience. Which was why, whenever he was on missions with his team on “The Bus” (or which is what S.H.I.E.L.D. would call it), he would have security to keep watch over his home and his niece whenever she was at college. So when he noticed Renee coming out of the library and descending down the stairs, he gave a smile as she hurried over to the car. He was glad to know that she knew about what “Lola” was—a flying car when it’s not in the public eye, anyway.

“Ready to go, kid?” Coulson asked her as Renee got into the passenger seat, careful not to mess up “Lola’s” paint, putting her backpack by her feet.

“All finished with my work, Uncle Phil,” she answered with a smile to hide her embarrassment back in the library.

Thus said, he shifted the car to “drive” and began to drive away from the library, with the car hood down and allowing her pulled-up hair in a ponytail and his tie to blow into the wind with a cheesy touch like in the movies. Neither of them spoke on the way back, but Coulson was first to break the silence.

“I’m going to be in Berlin for a few days with my team,” he spoke to Renee as she looked at him curiously, “I know that you want me to stay until you get into Winter Break, but it’s my job to be an agent. I know that you don’t want me to die unlike last time.”

“I wasn’t going to hold you back on your job as an agent,” she responded to him with a chuckle, “And besides, you survived your encounter with that god you told me about. That alone deserves some sort of medal in your case.”

Coulson chuckled uneasily, not knowing if he would tell her about the truth when he found out about “Tahiti” and how he really didn’t just die for “a few moments”. He knew that the other agents had to tell her otherwise, on how he was in a coma but that he would be all right, so that she wouldn’t break down in tears in front of Director Fury. But he kept his eyes on the road as he continued to drive down the road to the household.

“Yeah, I guess I do deserve some sort of medal, right?” he asked her with a smile to hide his uneasy thoughts.

“One that says ‘Best Uncle Ever’, because you may not have superpowers, but that doesn’t mean that you’re super-strong, Uncle Phil,” Renee responded before making a couple of flexes on her muscles on the last bit, acting all strong.

“Super-strong, as in Captain America strong?” Coulson asked again.

“Captain America strong times two, as in Captain America strong _and_ ‘Captain Coulson’ strong,” she corrected him playfully.

“Oh, so now I’m ‘Captain Coulson’ now?” he asked her teasingly with a smile, amused by his niece’s words.

They both laughed for a while before their laughter subsided as they continued to go down the road and outside of town, silence returning between them. Once again, Coulson was the first to break the silence.

“Are you going to need a business suit for tomorrow?” he asked Renee once they became serious again, “Or are you going casual again?”

“Business suit, for extra credit on the presentation—it’s already steam-pressed for tomorrow,” she answered to him.

“Good to hear that,” he responded to her with a nod. “I’ll ask Agent Hill to drop you off at the college, if she’s not busy with anything else. I might to ask a couple of agents to keep an eye on you while I’m gone in Berlin.”

“So that aliens, guys with superpowers, or even gods won’t try to attack me just because I’m your niece? Sounds very old-fashioned,” Renee stated to him with a scrupled nose for a moment as she turned her head to him, “But it’s a good old-fashioned, gotta tell you that. It’s just what people need these days.”

Coulson smiled at her response, proud to know that Renee learned that from him when she found out about Steve Rogers, or “Captain America” as he was called when he was in wartime of the 1940’s, and that she helped him out of redesigning the captain’s costume as well as finding the entire collection of vintage cards that he was trying to gather for a year. He just didn’t want to admit it to his idol about his niece, otherwise it would have looked weird.

“Hey, Uncle Phil,” Renee began to ask him, to which he answered to her, “Yes?”

“When can I ride in The Bus? You and the other agents seem to be fond of it,” she asked him, to which he chuckled and sighed at her question.

“Someday you will, but not tomorrow,” Coulson answered to her with a shrug of “eh, I don’t know when”, something that she had quickly caught on in his answer with a raised eyebrow at him, “Maybe after I return from Berlin, okay? You’ll get a free tour of The Bus and the authorization to be on it, too. Even hang around in the science lab.”

“Sounds good to me,” she was able to answer to him with a nod of approval once they were able to get to a close-by house in a quiet neighborhood, “And I would be off in Spring Break, so I would have time for that, too.”

Once they got to the house, Coulson put “Lola” onto the driveway to let Renee out of the red car, though he was hesitant to put the car back into gear to drive away. Either because he cared for his niece or the fact that she would be alone in the house, either one made him concerned. He didn’t want anything to happen to her. Renee caught on and just gave him one hell of a sass of an attitude with a smirk and a raised eyebrow. He knew what that meant and chuckled at her expression.

“You going to be okay, kiddo?” he asked her once his chuckles subsided.

“I’ll be fine, Uncle Phil,” she responded to him, “Take care in Berlin and tell Agents May and Ward I said ‘hi’!”

“You got it,” he spoke with a nod of his head before driving away from the driveway and out on the road again.

Renee watched as her uncle drove away before turning away and grabbing her keys from her backpack, using one to open her house door to get inside. Once inside, she put her backpack down and removed her shoes and jacket before moving to the refrigerator to see if there were any leftovers to have for dinner tonight. If not, she figured that there would be TV dinners in the freezer. For now, she wasn’t in the mood for dinner until later, so she headed to the living room to watch something good on the television. She noticed that _Firefly_ was on due to popular demand and figured, eh, she can give the first episode a watch or two in the meantime.

On the road, Coulson continued to drive, but used his cell phone to make a call a la speakerphone to headquarters. He was able to get Agent Maria Hill, a woman of authority with brown hair and blue eyes, on the phone and he asked her if she was free from missions as well as if she and a couple of security officers would be able to drop off Renee at the college, to keep a close eye on her and her classmates, and etcetera. The only thing that he knew would be important, however, would his niece’s safety. It was something that he was concerned with, though recent events had made him tensed and concerned that anything was bound to happen to her if there was a small mistake.

Once he made the call, he hung up and continued to drive down the lone road to where The Bus would be at, smoothly riding up onto the ramp without anything to stop it. But it wasn’t at a sunset. If it was, then it would be a Western-type tale.

 

 

 

 

Elsewhere, in an unknown location, some scientists testing on glowing blue substances within multiple clear vials, where they began to glow at the presence of a silver-gray metal piece, held by a pair of tongs. They were using some lab rats for the glowing blue substances for multiple tests, all resulting in failure and mutations until they had used the last lab rat that they could afford to buy to test it and found the last test to be a success, where there was not a single mutation appearing on the lab rat. None of the tests were done on a human subject, but tests were needed if human subjects were needed. For the moment, there would be none.

The first scientist, Doctor Dunham, was stirring one of the smaller vials of the serum to see if the formula itself was perfected. He was a middle-aged man with small glasses and very little hair left, wearing a white coat and rubber gloves to avoid burning himself with the serum. His colleague, Doctor Ernest, held the tongs containing the iridium in his hands, careful not to drop the element piece into the serum. Doctor Ernest was younger than Dunham, still having hair, but he was wearing goggles to protect his brown eyes from burning. Both found that the serum, while powerful enough for a simple subject to possibly have superpowers, would be hot to the touch without the proper equipment and that the subject would be forced to endure this type of heat.

 As they were working, however, they were called upon by a female voice following a whined feedback from the microphone. The two doctors cringed for a moment from the loud whined feedback, but resumed to normal when it stopped.

“Workers of Centipede, we have a problem,” the voice stoically spoke into the speakers throughout the room. The two scientists knew that something’s wrong and grimaced with fear that there would be either an intruder or something. “Please report to the Main Level for an assembly—and no, we will not have any coffee or cookies available.”

Doctors Dunham and Ernest eventually saved where they were and made their way to the main room with a large computer screen, where a woman in a blue flower dress waited for them and many more like them. She had her arms crossed with cool irritation, not very pleased when they saw her and knew that something was wrong. Once the scientists, soldiers, and much more of the workers came into the room, then the woman was able to speak to them. She was serious, cold, and uncaring of anyone’s emotions and she knew it.

“Ladies and gentlemen of Project Centipede,” she explained to them in a sincere tone with the screen showing the image and information of their newest target, “Two days ago at 4:56 p.m., in a public library in Arizona, we were hacked by our assailant and all of our information was stolen. The information, we believe, would fall into the wrong hands and our greatest work would be discontinued from making the world a better place. However, the assailant—18-year-old Renee J. Coulson—has connections with S.H.I.E.L.D., specifically one of its field agents. The Clairvoyant believes that she happens to work with the organization and will most likely deliver the stolen information to it. Luckily, the information he had gathered about her for us based on what he got from the library shall stop her at any costs from giving the information to S.H.I.E.L.D., and he has ordered us to capture her and to… treat her with the type of hospitality we show here at Project Centipede. He has also told us to test our latest serum on her, see if she like it.”

“But the serum’s still going through a test run, Miss Raina—wouldn’t that be painful?” one of the scientists spoke to the woman, only to be met with heads turning to him and confused eyes. He knew that the serum was still in testing mode—it had only been used on lab rats, never a human being—and he feared the worst to come out of it.

“Painful, yes,” Raina answered as if it was nothing, “But at least it gives us some type of conclusion about it. Now then, let’s assemble a little party for our little guest and how to bring her here…” With the last bit, she gave off a soft yet sinister smile from her stoic tone.

Both scientists looked at each other with fear, knowing the implications that the new serum would bring. Yet they feared to speak up and object to the idea. They only hoped that the woman in the dark flower dress would not be thinking of anything worse for the project’s target.

 

 

 

 

“One of the most crucial aspects of business would be the different organizational structures that would be presented depending on the type of career chosen,” Renee spoke calmly yet firmly in class as she presented her work in her class at the South Mountain Community College, dressed in a dark blue suit with a formal jacket, pencil skirt, white dress shirt, a pair of dark tights, black low heeled shoes, and a light blue neck sash wrapped in a bow as she held her essay in her hands, “Although some careers would have different structures, others would follow similar patterns of the traditional structure. True hard work, and patience, would allow the person to move up in what they do with the use of promotion as a reward. Work environments allow the workers to form friendly relationships and rivalries with each other, encouraging a welcoming environment and promoting a healthier future for the company chosen for the potential employee. However, it also brings new opportunities for the future employee, even expanding their horizons and so forth. In short, going into business with a certain career of choice is not only welcoming but also encouraging as well. Thank you.” When she finished, she made a small bow to her listening classmates before handing her essay to the teacher, Professor Goodwich.

A scattered applause appeared from her presentation, though Goodwich was nodding his head by what he read in the essay, eventually writing down an “A-“ on the paper and adding it “Impressive work, Miss Coulson” before giving it back to her and she returned to her seat.

Once Renee returned to her seat, she read the grade on her paper and the comment underneath it, having a small smile to herself. She figured that she received it because of the extra credit—wearing the business suit for the presentation. Then she put the essay into her folder and then into her backpack before closing it up and looking up to watch the next student to present to the class.

Outside of the classroom, however, were a few agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. in suits, shades, and with their tasers ready as they were forbidden to use firearms on college property ever since 2008. Agent Hill, wearing a dark blue jumpsuit and shades with an earpiece headset in her right ear and her hair pulled back in a low bun, was keeping watch for anything suspicious. She had accepted Agent Coulson’s call to make sure that Renee, endangered or not, was kept safe throughout the day and a few days more while he’s in Berlin with his team. Though it sounded like a strange yet degrading proposition, keeping watch over a fellow agent’s relative, Agent Hill was aware of Coulson’s concerns over his niece and how he feared that enemy corporations, possible aliens, and even gods looking for a second round of invading the Earth would go after her to break him down.

“Johnson to Hill, do you copy?” one of the other agents contacted to her with her earpiece.

“Hill to Johnson, I copy,” she answered in a low tone, “Give me the status update.”

“Nothing changed in the past 40 minutes, not since Coulson’s kid niece entered into the building,” the agent answered to her. “Though my pals and I are getting a couple of stares from some of the students that past by us.”

“If they try to ask questions, then ignore them,” Hill advised to him as she kept an eye out on campus, “If they pester or make threats for a fight, ask the college security for permission to use mace on them.”

“Affirmative, though I have a question: _why_ are we doing this, anyway?” the agent asked her as she listened to him.

“Unlike Agent Coulson, his niece is not properly trained to handle S.H.I.E.L.D. enemies on her own as a request from her father,” Hill explained to him in a low tone, “She’s well aware of the situations, but Coulson wants to keep her safe from possible harm. He’s asked us to keep an eye on her for a few days while he’s out in Berlin with his assigned team. When he returns, then we can be relieved of our duties given to us. Are we clear?”

“Affirmative,” the agent answered back before hanging up.

She knew that in case there would be trouble, Renee would use the walkie-talkie that Coulson gave her the first time her high school saw a few S.H.I.E.L.D. agents outside of classroom buildings wherever she went as if she was a rock star. Or at least a rock star with a kick-ass uncle for a calm-mannered agent.

As time went on, however, a couple of mysterious figures dressed in casual clothing took notice of two of the agents on the roof of a close-by building and went into the building in secret with forged IDs to get inside. There, the two figures’ eyes glowed orange and red with their veins in their necks glowing the same colors before placing heated hands on the agents’ necks and snapping them dead to the ground without any noise from the agents. Once the two figures removed the agents’ suits and put them on to play their part, they use the binoculars to spot where their target would be at. Then they noticed the map of the college campus and where their target would be located, having sadistic grins to themselves when they found the target’s location.

All they had to do now was to start and let the dominoes fall into place for the events to come.

“This is Thing One and Thing Two reporting,” One of the two deadly figures speaking to home base in confirmation of their location through his walkie-talkie, “We found our little guest. Shall we begin our little game with her?”

“Granted,” the voice speaking through the walkie-talkie.

There, the two soldiers-dressed-as-agents then used their new fire-like powers to create a deadly combination, where they had formed a few small fireballs in their hands and quickly threw it one a nearby building, creating a small explosion that shook the campus, causing glass and brick to fall onto the ground and hitting some students that were sitting close-by the damaged site. Hill heard the explosion as did the other agents, students that were walking and covering their heads, and Renee’s class during another presentation. Panic and fear struck them, Professor Goodwich instructing his class to get under their desks in case for impact, which all of them, including Renee, were able to do.

Renee, however, grabbed her walkie-talkie from her backpack and began her call on Agent Hill outside, knowing that this day would be full of danger. Agent Hill, on the other hand, was unexpected by the explosion as she and the agents on the ground were rushing to get any shaken up students and faculty staff members cowering and directing them to the library for safety. She got a call on her earpiece before hearing on who it is.

“Agent Hill, it’s Renee, I’m still in the classroom,” Renee’s shaken voice spoke to her, to which Hill stopped and listened closely, “Do you copy? I repeat, I’m still in the classroom!”

“Hill to Renee, I copy,” Hill answered, much to her relief that her co-agent’s niece was all right for now before instructing her, “Check for any fatalities in the room and get your classmates and professor out—Agent Peterson and I will be there to get you guys out immediately. Once we get you guys out, we’re taking you into the library. If it gets too serious, we’re calling in reinforcements to snuff the bastards out and get you out immediately.”

“But what about the college protocol? I don’t have authority to tell my own classmates what to do!” Renee responded with worry.

“Then tell your professor that the protocol no longer applies this time,” Hill responded to her with an understanding as to what to do, “This is now a Code Level Six situation for S.H.I.E.L.D.—tell him and your classmates that either they do as instructed for their own safety.”

Renee nodded in understanding as to what to do before responding to Hill, gulping a bit, “Got it, Hill. Coulson out.” With that, she put her walkie-talkie at her belt on her skirt and quickly stood up, heading over to the professor’s desk where Goodwich hid underneath his desk.

“Mr. Goodwich, we need to get out of here,” she stated to him in a serious tone, “Any minute now, the building’s going to collapse on us. The guys in black outside? They can help us out because they know what to do.”

“But it’s against emergency protocol,” he responded to her as if he thought of her as insane, “And how do you know what they do? They’re _your_ bodyguards!”

“They act like bodyguards, but they’re not, Mr. Goodwich,” she stated to him before explaining to him, “They work with S.H.I.E.L.D. and they can help you survive this unless you want to follow protocol here and end up being building pizza. I need the roll call so that I can check if anyone’s all right, so that I can report it to Agent Hill and the agents are going to evacuate us to the library, because _she_ has more authority about situations like this. You have to trust me on this!”

Goodwich was baffled by the amount of information that his student was telling him, but nodded before quickly reaching his hand up and grabbed the roll call off the desk and handing it to her.

“Godspeed to you, Miss Coulson,” he spoke to her with a nod of authorized approval, to which Renee stood up and held the roll call sheet in her hand.

There, she called on the names of each student, all confirming their presence in the room. She checked each one, finding that they’re here and alive, allowing her to move on and contact Agent Hill on her walkie-talkie. A few students poked their heads from out of under the desks in confusion when they watched her pull her walkie-talkie out.

“Renee to Hill, do you copy? No fatalities are reported in here, you’re good to go,” she spoke into the walkie-talkie, “I repeat, you’re good to go!”

“Hill to Renee, I copy,” Hill answered through the walkie-talkie once she and the agents got any surviving students into the library before they headed to where the injured students were at, “We’re on our way over to the classroom. Make sure no one leaves until we arrive, do you copy? We’re going to get any injured persons out of the area and make sure that they get medical attention.”

“No one leaves, I copy,” Renee responded with a sincere nod, biting her lower lip with worry, “Renee out.” With that, she ended her call on the walkie-talkie and put it by her belt again.

On the rooftops, however, the two soldiers used the second fireball to toss it at a building next to where Renee and her class was at, creating another explosion. This explosion hit another class and extended into her class, where the wall exploded, causing more chaos inside and forcing the students to cower under their seats in a sea of screams and yelps and away from the site. Renee herself also ducked under the professor’s seat, with bits of debris hitting the students’ desks and the ground. Once it was safe to get out of under the seats, she brought herself up and looked to see if there was anyone that was still there. Her ears briefly rung from the loud noise, nearly deafening her despite having her hands tightly covering her ears to protect them from the explosion. However, she was brought back down to noise level by screams and her professor’s frantic cries to her.

Outside, Agent Hill signaled to a few more agents next to the site of the second explosion and they hurried to the classroom where her co-worker’s niece was at. There, she opened the door and the four agents quickly hurried to get the students out of the room quickly and safely. Hill herself headed over to Renee’s location and got to her and Professor Goodwich.

“You all right?” she asked them, to which Goodwich nodded shakily, as did Renee. “Listen closely, the both of you. This is getting dangerous; we’re calling in reinforcements to contain this danger and help for your classmates. Has anyone tried to leave?”

“Everyone’s all accounted for, Agent Hill, and no one had any intentions to step out,” Renee answered to her, to which Hill grabbed her hand and stated to her, “Good, then let’s get out of here.” She looked to Goodwich before instructing to him, “Sir, your students need you immediately. Make sure that they are accounted for—Renee’s coming with me.”

“Why is that, madam?” the professor asked Agent Hill in anarchic confusion.

“If the suspects are after one thing or person, it’s probably your student,” she answered to him quickly as Renee looked at her before turning her head to him.

“If it’s for the best, then Miss Coulson is excused from class,” he responded before standing up and the three hurried as Renee grabbed her backpack on the way out, not wanting to leave it behind.

There, they hurried out before Goodwich is brought over to the two agents by the library. The S.H.I.E.L.D. agents that were with the injured students from the site where glass and stone fell on them were calling on medical attention with urgency. However, before Agent Hill and Renee could get to the library, the two soldiers on the rooftop threw the third fireball at the now empty building, causing another explosion and raising alarm for those witnessing. Hill was able to get behind the stone wall-bench and ducked down to avoid getting hit as Renee did the same. Once Renee was behind the stone wall with Agent Hill, the agent used her body to cover the student protectively until she felt that it was good to go for them.

However, the two soldiers took notice of Agent Hill and Renee coming out from behind the stone wall and quickly heading over to the library. The second one grinned before using his walkie-talkie to give a report to HQ elsewhere.

“Thing Two reporting to Project Centipede, our guest is now out into the open. Shall we borrow one of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s vehicles to pick her up?”

“Granted; we’ll be picking you up.”

With that, he ended the call and the two soldiers headed back inside with their new outfits and black shades on, going down the stairs inside of the building and walking out with their new roles to play to lure the prey to their group. They changed their attitudes to stoic and approached Agent Hill and Renee, to which both took notice of them. Hill didn’t seem to recognize them, but figured that no two agents would look alike.

“The suspects have yet to be found, Agent Hill,” one of them spoke to Hill as Renee held her backpack in her arms, “We recommend relocating Miss Coulson back to HQ immediately to prevent them from getting to her.”

“Did Director Fury give the approval on it?” Hill asked them suspiciously, not exactly sure if they were bluffing or not.

“He recommended it first,” the other answered to cover up their bluff.

Hill didn’t seem to be agreeable with them at first, but knew no other choice. She looked at Renee and placed her hands on her shoulders for eye level.

“Renee, listen,” she instructed her in a low tone, “Head over to one of the vehicles with Agent Maxwell and wait for me there. I have important things to do, but if there’s an emergency, use your walkie-talkie and call me, okay?”

Renee nodded in understanding to her.

“Okay…” With that, Hill turned her head to one of the other agents and walked over to him, giving a blond haired man with shades hiding his green eyes and a suit instructions regarding what she already told Renee.

Hill then gave instructions to the other agents to take care of the wounded, to keep watch for the suspects in case they strike back, and to make sure that the students and staff are evacuated from potential hit areas and brought to the library for safety. The blond haired agent, Agent Maxwell, walked over to Renee and signaled to her to follow him, to which both quickly made their way to the parking lot, where they reached to one of the parked vehicles with S.H.I.E.L.D.’s logo on both sides. Behind them, however, were the two super-soldiers disguised as the agents, having their new firearms by their hips, where one of them hurried to another vehicle of S.H.I.E.L.D. in the parking lot.

There, Agent Maxwell opened the back door of the car, allowing Renee to put her backpack inside first before stepping inside and sitting in the car. However, before he could go into the car, he felt the barrel of a gun pressing against the back of his head. A sound popped off and he saw blood splatters shine on the car before slumping forward and falling to the ground. Renee heard the gunshot outside and tensed up with fear, watching Agent Maxwell’s body slide off to the asphalt ground, to which she grabbed her walkie-talkie and held it to her hand to contact Agent Hill. The two “agents” came to her car and opened the back door with looks of concern.

“You alright, Miss Coulson?” one of them asked her, only to be met with a shaken nod before telling her, “Listen, this one isn’t safe for you to be in. The suspects are probably already in here and they might do the same with you.”

“But Agent Hill told me to wait for her in here,” Renee responded to him as she held her walkie-talkie in her hand.

“She told us to relocate you immediately,” he bluffed to her, though she tried to grab her backpack and he stopped her, making another lie to her, “Leave it, it’ll throw them off!”

The two soldiers then brought Renee to another S.H.I.E.L.D. vehicle, forced to leave behind her backpack in the vehicle, before getting into the vehicle and sitting in the backseat. She felt frightened, but needed to hide it from the “agents”. One of the soldiers removed his shades and got into the driver’s seat as the other got into the backseat next to her.

“What about Agent Maxwell? Is he going to be okay?” she asked out of concern, worried about the fallen agent outside.

“Who says we’re taking _him_?” the soldier asked as he turned his head to her with a sadistic grin and his eyes glowed in ember colors.

Renee grew afraid when she saw this, but before she could bolt out of the car to alert Agent Hill, however, she was held back by the other suspect, who pulled her back and covered her mouth to prevent her from making any loud noises to alert the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents outside. The first soldier then turned his head forward and pulled out his walkie-talkie to speak into it once the two were able to get their target of choice.

“This is Thing One reporting,” the driver spoke as the other soldier tightly restrained Renee from making any movements in case she was to escape, “We have our little guest. Requesting an aircraft to pick us up.”

“Request for an aircraft granted,” the person on the other end responded and the soldier that was restraining Renee grabbed some rope from his bag to bound her wrists together tightly.

Elsewhere, Agent Hill was assessing the damaged buildings to see if there was anyone inside of the classrooms as one of the agents went up to the rooftops of the building across the way to check up on the two agents. She found that there was a class going on when the attack occurred, lifeless bodies bleeding heavily as burnt flesh nearly made her nauseous, but she had to swallow it. When she heard the gunshot in the parking lot, however, her heart dropped and she turned her head, quickly running out to find Agent Maxwell on the ground with the back of his head bleeding and his pulse gone. She also found that Renee was missing, her backpack and her walkie-talkie only on the backseat. Then her earpiece was getting a contact and she had to answer.

“Hill, it’s about Agents Dee and Dum on the rooftops,” Agent Johnson alerted to her as her heart dropped with horrible realization, “The suspects were already here and had taken their suits.”

She then heard a car turning on and turned her head to see the two so-called “agents” in another S.H.I.E.L.D. vehicle with one of them on the wheel and the other with his hand over Renee’s mouth, to which she quickly got into the blood-splattered car and turned it on, quickly pressing her foot on the gas pedal and driving to the stolen vehicle with squealing tires and a fast speed to catch up to it. The two Centipede soldiers, however, took notice as Renee’s heart raced with fear, not knowing on what was going on at this point. The soldier that covered her mouth to silence her turned his head to find that they were being chased after, his eyes glowing orange and red again.

“Thing One, we got an uninvited guest behind us, step on it!” the soldier then barked at his fellow man, to which the other soldier cracked his neck and gritted his teeth, hitting the gas pedal to go faster.

Agent Hill watched as the stolen vehicle increased in speed before hitting the gas pedal to increase her vehicle’s speed as well, going after them and grabbing her gun with one of her hands on the wheel. She rolled down the window and aimed her gun outside at the car in front of her, careful not to aim at Renee, and began firing at the soldiers. The bullets hit parts of the car hood and Renee whimpered with her mouth covered by her captor, squeezing her eyes shut in fear of being killed. The captor watched with a scowl of the pesky S.H.I.E.L.D. agent trying to get to their prey.

As the chase went on, however, Hill watched as the car swerved off the road and onto the desert sand at an alarming speed, continuing to follow behind it to catch up with it. She continued to fire more bullets at it, careful to aim at either the driver or the man keeping Renee restrained, but quickly noticed that the car kept swerving in curves, making harder for her to have a good aim on one of them, as if they _wanted_ her to fire at Renee. Then she heard a low engine roar above her, to which she then looked up to find a large aircraft carrier, smuggled from the U.S. Military perhaps, flying above them with the cargo door large enough for a tank opened. She grew sick to her stomach when she found out what the two thieves intended to before pressing her foot on the gas pedal with all of her might, bringing the car at full speed towards the stolen vehicle to stop them.

The soldier that was driving at full speed noticed the S.H.I.E.L.D. agent catching up to them as the other that restrained Renee turned his head to see the car speeding up to them, but they grinned when the aircraft flew above them and in front of them with the ramp skidding on the desert ground. Agent Hill’s mask of stoic focus slipped to shock when she noticed the aircraft in front of the stolen vehicle, trying to keep focus of her new mission. She fired a few more rounds before her gun began clicking, now empty of bullets to try and slow the car down, so she ended up throwing her gun away out of the car and continued to drive faster.

Inside of the stolen vehicle, the soldier at the wheel turned his head to his partner briefly with a nod, to which the other soldier released Renee’s mouth, allowing her to hyperventilate in heart-racing fear, before pulling out a blindfold and quickly covering her eyes with it, tying it behind her head. She cried out in panic when this happened, just praying that it would be all over.

However, the stolen vehicle then got close to the ramp as Hill tried to get closer to the car, but the aircraft began to decrease in speed, allowing the stolen vehicle to drive up the ramp and into the aircraft, where the aircraft itself then began to pick up speed and height. There, the ramp and the cargo door began to close up once the craft began to pick up altitude and began to fly away until it was out of sight. Hill was forced to swerve to a stop, her hands tightly gripping on the wheel with guilt and shock rising in her heart. She couldn’t believe it—she had failed to save the person that she was assigned to protect. Now the clock is ticking and ticking fast.

Hill quickly began to drive back to the college so that she would have the other agents investigate the attack as well as the soldiers that caused it. She also contacted HQ as well as she drove back to the road leading to the college, where ambulances and fire trucks were there to examine the conditions of both alive and dead and to put out the fires made in the attacks, respectively. Some of the agents were attending to the injured while the others hurried over to Agent Hill in sudden urgency.

“This is Agent Hill reporting,” She spoke with sincere urgency in her tone to the operator back at HQ, “There has been an attack at the South Mountain Community College at 1150 Hours. Renee Coulson has been captured by the attackers and they have taken off by aircraft. We need to send out an alert to Agent Coulson and to S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters immediately. I know he’s in Berlin with his team right now—send out the alert to him _now_!”


	2. First Test

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Centipede starts their first test on their latest serum on Renee just as Phil Coulson wraps up his mission in Berlin. When he finds out, he is anything but patient...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HUGE WARNING FOR ANYONE UNCOMFORTABLE WITH ANYTHING MEDICAL. This chapter and the following chapters will feature moments of torture that involves needles, so this is a reminder for those that are not okay with torture and/or needles. If you feel uncomfortable during this chapter, I highly recommend to tell me so that I can give you some comfort.
> 
> Now that's out of the way, let us proceed.

Elsewhere, in Berlin, Agent Coulson held his gun in his hand after getting into the hostel where the enemy was in. The enemy, a spy that had been stealing millions of American dollars’ worth of scientific equipment and alien elemental metals from a destroyed lab, was a suave smooth-talker. He knew that, using one of his female teammates as bait to lure some information out of him, the mission would go smoothly as planned for the team. Outside was another agent, a Level Seven specialist named Ward, as he adjusted his suit and tie a bit so that he would appear clean when he takes down the enemy. He had to be brought along for the ride in this case, being that his social skills are starting to improve on Coulson’s watch, though they were still rusty in a few other areas as well. However, his walkie-talkie began to crackle for a moment as he waited for the thieving spy to come out. Ward briefly looked down at the walkie-talkie, thinking that it was the hacker of the team, Skye, trying to prank him again, even with the tracking bracelet on her wrist.

Inside of the hostel, however, Coulson noticed quickly that the spy was not alone—a whole fleet of spies were inside the hostel room and he didn’t even practiced his German. Still, he waited for at least one of the spies to come out so that he would lead the ambush. Moments passed, and one of the spies walked out of the room to head down to the lobbies for a quick bite. Coulson heard the footsteps and quickly yoinked him out of the hallway and on the wall, quickly covering the spy’s mouth and bounding his wrists together in handcuffs.

“I hope you speak English, Mister Marc Spector, because my German is a little rusty,” he quietly spoke to the spy as he then tightened the handcuffs, “That, and you and your friends have stolen some stuff of importance. Now then, may I borrow your phone for a minute? My team and I will make sure to treat you comfortably in a cell.”

With that, Coulson gives Ward outside the approval for him, alongside of the pilot of The Bus and another agent Melinda May, to get into the hostel to ambush the group of spies inside. Ward, however, was puzzled by the walkie-talkie’s crackle and remained puzzled by it, not sure if he was certain to answer the call. He had to shake it off and focused on the mission as hard as he could, knowing that he would have to speak to Skye about pranking him again. The two agents hurried into the hostel and where Coulson was with the bounded spy in the hallway.

“On my count, guys,” the agent whispered to Ward and May as he pulled out his gun and they did the same as well, the bounded spy keeping to himself and keeping quiet, “Afterwards, we’re going back on The Bus for some lunch.”

Once they were able to make an ambush on the group of spies and taking them down in a fight within the hostel room, all while the restrained spy stayed with his back on the wall, the three used handcuffs to restrain the other spies and have the German police to arrest spies of German-born while the rest were to be taken back to their countries of origin. All except one—Spector—were taken away by the police. Spector, having brown slightly curly hair and blue eyes, was waiting patiently in the hallway for the three agents to put him into the S.H.I.E.L.D. vehicle, being that he was caught. There, they got to the vehicle with Spector into the backseat with the rest of the cargo and Ward keeping a close watch on him with his gun at his side as to warn him not to do anything stupid while they were heading to their aircraft, all with May driving at the wheel.

“Guys, good job today,” Coulson congratulated his teammates as they made their way back to The Bus, “Not only are the spies caught, but the equipment will be returned to the scientists from where the stuff was stolen from and the alien metals… well, they’re being brought into HQ for some examination. Fitz-Simmons says it’s probably Skrull origin, whatever that means.” He turned his head to Ward in the backseat, asking him, “How’s our new friend, Agent Ward?”

“He hasn’t talked much since we caught him,” he answered as the captured spy turned his head to him with concerned puppy eyes and not else to talk about, “Maybe he doesn’t speak English like the others.”

“Well, according to the records, he used to be in the CIA,” Agent May explained stoically as she drove the vehicle, “He was laid off when his co-workers noticed that he went crazy during a trip to Egypt until they found him at a ruined temple. Well, eventually he became a spy with knowledge of secrecy and lunacy because of his multiple personalities. It fits alongside his other jobs as a police officer and a waiter at a restaurant.”

“Did you do it for the money, Spector? Like always?” Coulson asked the captured spy collectively.

“A-actually, I did it for the free food…” Spector responded in a meek tone, keeping his bounded wrists to himself.

Coulson shrugged it off and pulled out his cell phone, to which Agent May took notice from the corner of her eye as she kept her hands on the wheel. There, he got to his niece’s number and began to call her, only to find that the call went to voicemail every time. He did it three times and each time went to voicemail. He furrowed his eyebrows with concern, a part of his mind thinking that there was probably something wrong. But he couldn’t say what it was on the tip of his tongue.

“Who were you trying to call, Coulson?” Agent May asked him as they continued to make their way to where The Bus was located at.

“My niece, Renee, back home in Arizona, but she’s not answering her cell,” Coulson answered to her once he put his cell phone away, “She’s probably out somewhere with a couple of security guards and with her cell’s charging at the house or something. Or maybe she’s taking a nap after class at her school. Either one’s fine.”

“Never met her before,” May spoke after trying to remember if she’s met her co-agent’s relative before, “Though I’ve heard her voice before.”

“Renee’s a great kid, always there for me,” Coulson responded with a smile on his face in thinking about his niece, “Next time I return to Arizona, I’ll make sure to bring her to The Bus so that she could meet the team and have a tour around it, free of charge.”

“Just keep her away from Skye if you do,” May advised stoically as she kept her eyes on the road.

“I planned on it,” the agent agreed to her with a nod.

Ward wanted to speak up on the walkie-talkie crackle, but kept quiet as he continued to keep an eye on the captured spy. The way that his co-workers were speaking to each other seemed to be disjointing to him—he’s never talked about his brothers before, but never wanted to. Just the memories of his older brother made him cringe internally. The captured spy took notice of Ward’s discomfort and lowered his wrists to pat the specialist on the knee, except he was stopped by the barrel of a gun at his left rib and brought his bounded wrists to his own knees instead.

Once they neared to where The Bus was located, Ward finally spoke up.

“Hey, Coulson,” he began to speak.

“What is it, Agent Ward?” Coulson answered without turning his head to him in the backseat.

“While we were waiting for your signal, my walkie-talkie was going off,” Ward began to explain as Spector silently watched them talk, “Thought it was Skye goofing off again, so I just ignored it.”

“I’ll need to check her tracking device when we get back to The Bus, see if she has taken it off again,” Coulson then responded back to the specialist, “If she did, then I might to go with something stronger to prevent her from doing it yet again. We’ll also check to see if the walkie-talkie’s getting past its’ prime and I would probably put it into my collection to fix it again for modern-day conveniences. Maybe fix it up. Who knows?”

Ward understood this and nodded before returning his attention to the captured spy, who was listening to the entire thing.

“Excuse me, I hate to speak up because I’m supposed to stay quiet, but… who’s Skye?” Spector asked meekly, but no answer came from any of the agents. Instead, Ward simply pressed the barrel of the gun harder to the spy’s side, forcing him to keep quiet again.

 

 

 

 

At the location where Project Centipede was held at, the two soldiers that kidnapped Renee arrived into one of the labs of the building, where they forced the blindfolded and bounded captive into the room as she shook and quietly whimpered with growing fear. They had removed both her shoes and her formal suit jacket, leaving her in her top, skirt, and tights, for anything unthinkable that their supervisor would suggest for their little “guest”. The woman in the flower dress, Raina, and the two scientists, Doctors Dunham and Ernest, as well as some other scientists and soldiers guarding the lab door, were in the room waiting for them when they noticed the soldiers walk inside with the captive at their tight grips. Renee was confused and growing afraid, yet she could not show this fear to the enemies, just like how her uncle would tell her in case of danger.

There, the two soldiers forced her down on a chair and removed the blindfold from her eyes, allowing her to see again. Renee, however, found herself confused when she saw the lab and her hands bounded by rope, along with scientists, a woman in a dark flower dress, and an operating table at the center of the room with leather and metal straps by its sides and bolted down by nails. She quickly registered that it was not S.H.I.E.L.D. that she was at—it was much worse than she thought it would be, anyway. Raina walked over to her with a stoic face, though Renee’s heart raced with nervousness as to what was to happen.

“So, you must be the thief that stole vital information from us, aren’t you?” Raina inquired to the captive with her arms crossed.

“Wha-what are you talking about?” Renee asked back to her, shaking her head in genuine puzzlement. Thief? Vital information? What was that woman talking about?

“Oh please, don’t lie to us,” the woman in the dark flower dress sneered at her. “We know you stole information from us. Did you?”

“What do you mean I stole information from you?” she asked again with confusion.

“Don’t play stupid with us, Miss Coulson,” Raina responded with a scoff, “Do you have any idea what you did?”

“I don’t know who you guys are! How could I stolen something from you guys?!” Renee answered, her body shaking with worry that something had gone haywire and she didn’t know about it at all. Getting kidnapped is one thing, but being questioned for stealing something from a group of people she’s never met was another. Maybe connected.

“We are Project Centipede, Miss Coulson, with the mission to give mankind a chance to be the heroes that S.H.I.E.L.D. wants to hide from,” Raina explained to her as Renee grimaced at the woman’s words, realizing that this was no roleplaying group at all, “But unfortunately for us, _you_ screwed us over. As a result, we have the right to give exact punishment to you.”

Renee gulped with puzzlement and worry about what the woman meant by this as Raina walked over to a clear tank of glowing blue substance with iridium pieces inside of it at a very high temperature in heat. The captive’s heart raced and she grew afraid when she recognized the coloring based on photos that her uncle had shown her two years before. Raina, on the other hand, was unnerved by the appearance of the clear tank and turned around to Renee to speak.

“See this, Miss Coulson? Using smuggled particles from the Cosmic Cube with thanks to some insiders on the job, heated up by iridium, and given to a comfortable temperature, this is Project Centipede’s newest creation: the Tesseract serum beta,” Raina explained to Renee as the latter was ready to show fear in her eyes, “Using the Tesseract serum, we can give mankind the powers that we have dreamed of conquering—the power of space and radiation without the fear of getting cancer. Science would be brought to a new level if we offer this serum to those that have always wanted to have the power to open portals to new dimensions. There is one little thing we needed to do before we officially sell it to the black market, however. We have been testing it on lab rats in the past when we first created prototype, never on a human. Fortunately for us, that’s about to change.” With that, she directed her attention to the two soldiers and ordered them stoically, “Put her on the table.” This order made Renee’s eyes wide with horror at what she meant by it.

The two soldiers nodded and brought Renee up as she began to struggle in their grip, to which they dragged her by her heels as the scientists began preparing the glowing blue serum by carefully draining a pint of it into an unbreakable bag. Renee’s heart raced faster when the super-soldiers brought her over and forcibly put her back against the operating table and removing the ropes before forcing her arms down and out as well as rolling her sleeves up to reveal her arms for her veins to be shown, tightly strapping them on her hands and above her elbows with leather and metal straps bolted down on the table. They also strapped down her ankles and upper thighs with tight leather straps and her waist with leather and metal straps as well. Renee, at this point, was frightened and was starting to panic, fearing the worst outcome from this “punishment”. She remembered how Agent Coulson told her about the Tesseract Cube itself, how it has the unthinkable power to open portals to other dimensions and that S.H.I.E.L.D. had been planning on exploiting the Cube’s power to new weapons in “Phase 2”. However, when plans fell through after the Invasion of New York, the weapons were quickly abandoned.

“Uncle Phil, please save me,” she whispered to herself quietly repeatedly as the two soldiers tightened the straps and adjusted the table so that the table would be standing upright for the scientists to begin on her.

“Oh, and don’t think about getting out here alive, Miss Coulson—the serum’s not meant to be for those wanting superpowers, anyway,” Raina added as the table was locked into place and Renee was shaking with fear. She turned to the scientists and coldly said to them, “Make sure the bag of the serum is empty by tomorrow morning. I want it to be slow and painful as possible.”

Raina made a cruel smirk to herself at seeing the progress before turning away and walking away from the lab, returning to where her temporary office was located. She knew that it would go according to plan—test the new serum on the test subject and then sell it to the suckers that expected to get some type of superpowers from it like Extremis.

In the lab, Renee’s breath quickened and heart raced faster with fear as the scientists continued to prepare for the “punishment”. She was looking over at the tank of the Tesseract serum with the iridium pieces floating in it, to which the liquid was bubbling with heavy steam pumping out of it. In the back of her mind, she was frightened out of her wits—not just by the serum itself, but also the idea of having a drop of it in one’s body. She feared that if she is injected with it, then she would accidentally teleport someone or even kill them with one touch. So she shook more and squeezed her eyes shut, praying again for her uncle to come and find her and to get out of the nightmare as well.

Once they were finished preparing the serum to start the experiments, Doctors Dunham and Ernest then grabbed some medical equipment to prepare the captive for injecting the serum in both of her arms. Although they were unsure about actually doing it, they knew that they had no other choice unless things became serious. Dunham walked over to the needles and the antiseptic while Ernest remained with the captive to make notes of her progress.

“You must be Coulson, yes?” he asked her calmly as he checked her pulse, her blood pressure, and her heartbeat carefully, though Renee didn’t seem to answer him, “I understand that this is new to you, but rest assure that Project Centipede takes full responsibilities of anything that happens here in this lab. Just don’t worry.”

“Why are you doing this to me?” she asked him with fear creeping in her heart. “Why do you listen to that woman? Are you like her, too?”

Ernest paused for a moment at her question, not knowing that he has the answer to her. The questions that she was asking tested his moral, and he asked himself every time he used the different prototypes of the serum on the lab rats. He hesitantly continued before writing down some notes on a piece of paper and hurried over to one of the other scientists outside of the lab. There, the scientist began to type the note up before printing it out for them:

 

TESSERACT SERUM TEST

 

PRE-TRIAL

 

Subject: Renee J. Coulson

Age: 18 years old

Subject Status: Alive, expected to be deceased

Time: 7:50 p.m.

 

Subject is healthy, no symptoms yet

Subject is actively speaking and is fully awake

Subject is conscious

 

Ernest, PhD, and Dunham, PhD, are responsible for prepping the subject and the serum. Subject is actively speaking, fully awake and conscious. Subject’s body temperature is 98.6 Degrees. Quantity for the first trial is 16 ounces (1 pint) of the Tesseract serum.

 

Once the printed out note was brought to the doctors, Doctor Dunham then walked over to his colleague with two needles and antiseptic, alongside of some tape and tourniquets, handing two of each to Ernest. Renee noticed this and panicked a bit, moving slightly to slip out of the straps.

“What’s going on? What are you doing?!” she cried out in horror, lifting her head a bit and turning her heads to look at both of them.

“You will feel a little pinch or two on both arms as well as your wrists,” Dunham explained to her calmly as Ernest went over to put two cords underneath the bag containing the serum inside as well as her left arm with the unsheathed needles, “It might be difficult to explain, but it’s going to be okay, Miss Coulson. Just-just trust us on that.” He was hesitant at his words, but he had to swallow it. Ernest was also uneasy with his actions, but knew to do it as part of their orders.

There, the doctors began rubbing the antiseptic on both sides of her arms to find a suitable vein before wrapping the tourniquets around her arms first. There, the doctors inserted the needles into her arms when they found a vein in both arms before placing the tapes to keep the needles in place and removing the tourniquets from around her arms. Renee slightly winced as her shoulders were strapped as well and made a small cry out when she barely winced. She quietly whimpered when they hesitantly brought the clamped bag cords to the needles, connecting the cords with the syringes.

When it was time, the doctors then carefully unclamped the cords for the glowing blue liquid to flow slowly out of the bag and into the cords, reaching to the veins. Renee watched with her heart racing faster and grew even more afraid, not knowing that was to happen though the doctors began taking some regretful steps away from her, something she feared on what they would do. They were cringing uncomfortably, as if they wanted to apologize to her, but they began to walk away from her and to their computers to jot down notes of what was going on.

“Help me…” Renee whimpered with unsure as the liquids in the cords continued to flow down in them, extracting out a bit of steam into the cords themselves.

Then the serum entered into her veins and began to flow into her arms and, in sheer pain from the extreme heat of the liquids into her veins, she began screaming loudly and squeezing her eyes shut, with no one to come and save her now.

 

 

 

 

On the CXD 23 Airborne Mobile Command Station, or “The Bus” as it is called, and above the Atlantic Ocean to return to the States, Coulson closed up the holding cell for the captured spy to be in before walking away and into his office, filled with a collection of nostalgia. His team was mostly relaxing in the passenger room by his office, except for Agent May, who was piloting The Bus. Ward was reading a good book and having a drink from the bar, the two agents simply entitled “Fitz-Simmons” as they were together were down in the research room by the cargo hold below, and the team’s hacker only going by “Skye” was in her room and on her bed, looking up at the ceiling in boredom.

In his office, Coulson was examining Ward’s walkie-talkie carefully, having already asking Skye if she had removed her tracking bracelet to play with it. She truthfully denied it and was let go for now until he could figure out what was going on. He had thoughts of seeing Renee again and letting her meet his team as well as The Bus itself, having already met Lola. He knew that she would be curious to see what Fitz-Simmons would be doing when they work, though he had to take note to himself not to let her interact with Skye—probably wondering that the two of them would like birds of a feather. He even had to write it down and he let Skye know about it, to which she complied on it.

His thoughts were interrupted when the walkie-talkie began crackling again and held it in his hands curiously. He merely shrugged and began to answer into it.

“This is Agent Coulson speaking, may I ask who is this?” Coulson spoke into the walkie-talkie without any worries, though the crackling made his eyebrow raise a bit.

“Oh finally, you answered—this is Agent Hill reporting from the Arizona base,” Agent Hill’s voice answered through with seriousness laced with annoyance in her tone.

“Hill? How’s Renee doing back home? Can you tell her that I’m coming home from Berlin?” he began to ask Agent Hill with a slight smile on his face, just thinking about what his niece would react when she heard the news of his return.

“That’s what I needed to tell you because there’s a problem: Renee’s been taken,” Hill alerted to him.

Coulson’s smile faded when he heard the news. His blood ran cold and his heart stopped for a moment, no longer feeling delighted at seeing his niece again. Instead, he felt disbelief and worry, not knowing if she was all right or not. His protective instincts grew within him and brought himself to speak through the walkie-talkie again, his calm and collected demeanor slipping away to reveal his true emotions when he received the news.

“Agent Hill, tell Director Fury that my team and I will arrive at the base immediately, no questions needed—Coulson out,” he spoke again before quickly putting the walkie-talkie down and bolting out of his office in the Command Center and into the cockpit, where Agent May was piloting. “Melinda, set coordinates to the S.H.I.E.L.D. base in Arizona immediately. We have an emergency.”

Agent May was, of course, surprised when she heard Coulson’s tone of voice: frantic, concerned, and unsure. But she nodded to him and began to set coordinates, by his words, to locate where the Arizona base would be located at. Once he saw that the pilot was setting coordinates for their location, Coulson then quickly headed out of the control room and into the passenger room, where Ward, Fitz-Simmons, and Skye noticed a change in him. They had never seen this part of Coulson before, who was usually calm and collected until this point.

“Everything okay, A.C.?” Skye asked him with concern, not used to seeing him like this at all.

“Everyone prepare for landing; we’re going to the Arizona base, but we’re not going to be taking any tours around it,” Coulson answered with fears of his niece in danger rising, “We have a new mission to take when we get there.”

“Why, what’s wrong?” Agent Simmons, a female researcher for bio-chemistry and with a British accent, asked him as well as the team got into the seats and began buckling up in seatbelts to prepare for when they land.

“My niece’s been taken,” he answered to him with growing anger and fear within him, “And I’m going to find out who, where, and _why_.”

The team fell into silence when they heard this, worried that Coulson wasn’t being his usual calm and cool self at all—but the agent himself didn’t care. The only thing on his mind was his niece’s safety.

 

 

 

 

Once The Bus found its way back to base at S.H.I.E.L.D., Agent May gave commands of its arrival and landed the Boeing carefully, where Coulson rushed down to the cargo hold and opened the cargo door open to get out and meet up with Fury as soon as possible. He didn’t bother with regulations this time—he knew that the clock was ticking. There, S.H.I.E.L.D. soldiers and agents were there with Agent Hill, who was concerned by what Coulson was going through, and Director Fury, who was hiding his own concern for his “one good eye”.

His team followed suit and tried to stop him from storming away from The Bus, but they had no other choice except to, well, follow him.

“Agent Hill, how did it happen?” Coulson asked Hill without a hint of calmness in him—just concern, anger and worry, “I need to know so that I can get a verified location.”

“Renee’s college was attacked by two soldiers with attributes that can easily point to Extremis, but it was a ploy to lure her out,” Hill answered to him as the large formation of agents went into the base, “They disguised themselves as our own men and they took her without warning, using an aircraft to take them away. They killed 14 people and injured 20 more in the attack, especially with the fact that they have done enough damage already.”

“Where did they take her?” Coulson asked without looking at her.

“We don’t know yet,” she responded firmly to get him to stop.

“Then start from there, I don’t want anyone to stop until they found her location,” he stated to her in a low tone, refusing to stop.

There, the agents that were at the base first hurried to the monitors and began using everything that they have in their arsenal of equipment: sonar radars, eyes and ears outside of the base, everything they can find to locate where the field agent’s relative would be held at. This made concern amongst Coulson’s team, knowing that this type of growing fury would be dangerous, even deadly, if they don’t help out as well. Agent Hill, however, knew that if she told her co-agent more about the kidnapping, then it would be worse by his reaction.

“Anyone find anything yet?” Coulson inquired, his patience ready to grow thin.

“We’re trying, Coulson,” one of the technicians responded nervously as they were making attempts to find the location.

“Then _try_ harder,” he ordered with a small choke in his throat, “We’re going to need some backup specialists, some firearms, and the Quinjet so that we can make an ambush on the bastards and get my niece out of there.”

“Coulson, listen to me,” Fury sternly spoke to the agent as he turned him to the director, “I understand that you want to find your niece as fast as you can—Renee’s a good kid, I will give you credit for that—but we don’t have a solid lead yet. Right now, we have nothing that can get her back—no clues, no ID on her kidnappers, damn near _nothing_. Unless we get something that can lead somewhere, we can’t pinpoint a location right now. I’m sorry, Phil, but you’re going have to wait.”

Coulson’s team listened to Fury’s words with concern, as did the team leader himself, though he looked away with feelings of guilt began to mingle with his emotions of impatience and panic. The director turned his head to Agents Ward and May, and letting them get him to another office to help him clear his head. The rest of the team followed suit before Fury turned to Hill and looked at her.

“Agent Hill, make sure that Coulson doesn’t destroy the room or his team,” he ordered her in a low voice, to which she nodded and left his side to follow behind the team before he turned to the technicians and speaking to them with authority, “All right, listen up, folks! One of our agents’ relatives has been kidnapped by two white males, both with dark hair and with stolen agent suits. They were last seen in Arizona, having stolen one of our vehicles at the South Mountain Community College, with the license plate number on the screen before you. We will need everything to help find Miss Renee Coulson. If the situation gets too serious, we will call upon specialists to form a rescue plan. Are we clear on it?” At his words, the technicians nodded all at once, knowing the sincerity of this new mission. “Good, then let’s do it.” With that, Fury made his exit out to speak with a few people immediately.

 

 

 

 

Inside the room nearby the control room and the computers, Coulson sit quietly with his elbows on his knees with his head down and Agent Hill stood by the doorway, keeping watching. Fitz-Simmons were rubbing and patting his back for him to calm down and to think clearly as Skye sat in one of the chairs with concern, watching this happen. She couldn’t help but feel sorry for him, the feeling of helplessness and rage over having a loved one being kidnapped. It made her concerned and worried a bit, for both the agent and for his family member.

Hill eventually walked over to Coulson and stood in front of him, feeling subtle guilt over her own failure.

“Coulson, I… I’m sorry that I failed to protect Renee,” she apologized to him quietly, though he didn’t look up at her. “It was my responsibility and I…” She sighed a bit, trying to say the right words to him, “I didn’t know that it was going to happen.”

“It wasn’t your fault, Hill,” he responded, sniffling a bit, “I should have been more careful with protecting her more.”

“We’ll find her, Coulson,” she assured him, holding back tears from her eyes, just so she wouldn’t look too personal in front of the other agents, “I can’t guarantee her safety when it’s all over, but we will find her.”

Coulson didn’t look up at her at her words, though he nodded at her words. Hill, on the other hand, sighed and looked at Agent May for a moment.

“I need to go and help Fury, but I will… try to comfort Coulson as well for his loss,” Hill spoke to May before asking her, “Can you get the team back on The Bus in the meantime? We should give him some alone time, let him calm down on his own.”

“Sure, Hill,” Agent May responded to her before turning to Ward, Fitz-Simmons, and Skye and speaking to them, “Let’s go back, guys, and wait in the meantime.”

“Um, let me stay with Coulson for a few minutes,” Skye responded in a low tone, not wanting to leave yet.

Despite lacking trust in the hacker, Agent May hesitantly nodded and turned away, with Ward and Fitz-Simmons following behind; Agent Hill watched and followed suit, closing the door behind her and leaving Skye alone with Coulson. There, Skye walked over to Coulson and sat down next to him to comfort him as best as she could.

“I know you want to be alone, but I can’t leave you to yourself…” she spoke to him sympathetically, “Especially during a crisis like this.”

“Please don’t leave me,” he responded to her as he was holding back tears of despair, continuing to look down on the ground, “I might need the comfort.”

“Well, can I ask a couple of questions about your niece?” Skye asked him, trying not to upset him, though he nodded to her question, “What’s she like and why does she mean a lot to you?”

Coulson took a deep breath and exhaled, looking up at Skye before sitting straight up and turning a bit to her to answer her questions.

“Renee is… well, unlike any other niece—well, she’s my only niece,” he began to explain and she listened to him, “She’s mature than kids her age these days, but she is a good listener, always helps out if she wanted to, and is always patient. The first time I brought her onto the Helicarrier, after I told her what I do for a living for a school project, she understood the rules and not once made trouble for any of the agents. The others thought I was going against protocol for bringing an outsider into S.H.I.E.L.D., but when they observed her moves and her actions, they changed their minds. Fury was surprised, but my brother was pissed when he found out. He told me not to make his daughter like me—an agent. He feared that she would die during a mission, fail school and never graduate, and even skipping school. He was also worried that she would use her new martial training to break out fights at school and that she would become violent if she was given a gun in her hands. So I made a promise to him not to give her any training, any guns, and so on; but on the condition that she would be given basic rules when visiting any of the bases at S.H.I.E.L.D. and a walkie-talkie to maintain contact in case she was in danger.”

“What happened to your brother?” Skye asked him in a low voice.

“He… he died in a car accident while Renee was a freshman in high school,” Coulson responded quietly as he sniffled again a bit, “No one knew why this happened, but when she found out that her father was gone, she broke down completely and it only took myself and a few others to help comfort her. Her mother didn’t want to associate herself with her ex-husband or me anymore, so Renee went into my care as my brother’s dying wish.”

Skye listened to him with a nod of her head, not asking him another question.

“At first, it was strange for her to be surrounded by a couple of agents wherever she went ever since her father’s death, but over time, it became a normal thing for both of us,” he continued on, looking away from her, “But I also gave her advice, too, in case something was to happen to either of us in the future. It was ‘stay strong for me’. Especially after I was stabbed by an Asgardian. Whenever we were together for a project here or at her high school, we were a combined thinking machine, much like Fitz-Simmons. Just related to each other. Whenever she wanted to interview someone with a career choice for school, she would go to me first. She earned good grades on it, helped her graduate this past summer. It just—it just makes me proud of both of us. I just hoped that her father would be proud of her as well.”

“She means a lot to you, does she?” Skye asked him, feeling the need to shed a tear or two from his words, to which he nodded.

“I just feel that, if we’re too late in saving her, then I feel that I have let my brother down in keeping her safe,” Coulson responded as he looked down with light despair, “I don’t want to lose the one person that… that I deeply care about.”

“Then let me help you out,” she told him to give him comfort, “Let me use resources into finding out who took her and where she is. I know that you don’t want her to meet me, I understand that; but I want to help you save her. I know what it’s like to lose family, Coulson. Just let me help you and the others out. Please?”

Coulson looked at her with disbelief before looking at her tracking bracelet with conflicted thoughts in his head. He knew that, if he removed the bracelet off of her wrist, she would break his trust again. However, he also knew that she was being sincere into saving Renee, even if he thought that she would be a bad influence on her. So he made a low sigh and brought Skye’s arm up for her to hold, where he then removed the tracking bracelet off of her wrist before standing up.

“I’m not going to beg, but please, for my niece,” he spoke to her as she slowly stood up, surprised that he removed the tracking bracelet from around her wrist, “Just stay focused on the mission, okay?”

“I will,” Skye answered seriously with a nod.

Thus said, Coulson put the tracking bracelet into his pocket and opened the door for the two of them to get out of the room, heading out to join the rest of the team in The Bus to get started. He knew that time was of the essence and that there has to be no mistakes into saving his niece.

 

 

 

Back at Project Centipede’s location, it was 8:45 a.m. when Raina returned to the lab to check upon the progress of the serum, wearing a light flower dress. She heard painful screaming in the lab and saw Renee still strapped on the operating table, enduring two cords under an empty bag when the last of the serum went into her veins. She remained unmoved by Renee’s screams and loud groans in agony when there was none left in the bag for now. However, she did walk over to the nervous scientists to check upon the progress of the serum.

“How’s our guest doing?” Raina asked Doctors Ernest and Dunham.

“Erm, Miss Coulson is, uh, reacting properly to the serum, madam,” Doctor Ernest responded as he adjusted his glasses a bit, “Quite vocal, I will admit.”

Raina looked over with a smug smile to the progress, seeing Renee on the table with her head back against the table and groaning in pain, before looking back on the scientists.

“So the serum’s a success?” she asked with her arms crossed.

“Well… yes,” Doctor Dunham answered as he removed his glasses for a moment, “But it is, by no means, safe. We checked Miss Coulson’s progress and, to be frank, there’s something wrong with her. Not the serum, her.”

“Does it matter? She stole our information from us, so we have the right to decide what we can do with her,” Raina responded, not even caring. “Besides, I prefer to see a body bag when it’s all over.”

Both scientists grimaced at the woman’s response, shocked that they would rather kill their test subject. Yet if they were to ask if it was really humane to do that, they knew what her answer would be, regardless of what they say.

“Double the dosage on her, and make sure you get yourselves something to eat in the meantime,” she ordered stoically, “Just don’t bother giving her any. We never give our lab rats any food when they’re finished.” With that, Raina turned away from them and walked away from them, to which they were nervous and hesitant to do.

As Doctor Dunham walked over to check on the test subject, however, Doctor Ernest began to type up the notes for the first dose:

 

TESSERACT SERUM TEST

 

FIRST TRIAL

 

Subject: Renee J. Coulson

Age: 18 years old

Subject Status: Alive, expected to be deceased

Time: 8:45 a.m.

 

Subject is healthy, though body temperature has spiked up to 99.7 Degrees and subject is in pain

Subject is actively speaking and is fully awake

Subject is conscious and reacting well to the serum’s effects

 

Ernest, PhD, and Dunham, PhD, are responsible for observing the subject and the serum. Subject is actively speaking, fully awake and conscious. Quantity for the first trial is 16 ounces (1 pint) of the Tesseract serum. Quantity for the second trial is 32 ounces (2 pints).

Over to where Renee was at, Doctor Dunham grabbed his stereoscope and began to check her pulse and her heart rate. Renee herself was groaning and gasping, trying to keep herself from screaming again despite the sheer pain.

“How are you feeling, Miss Coulson?” he asked her.

“It hurts!” she cried out quietly as she had to hold back from crying, to which she was breathing in and out with uneasiness of what was to be next.

As he was checking on her status, however, Doctor Dunham took notice of her eyes and carefully examined her for a few moments. He saw that her white sclera was light red and her grey eyes looked darker than he last examined her; he also noticed light red marks around her eyes, shaped like her veins, and noticed a couple more on her neck above her collarbone and a few more on her wrists and around the needles in her arms. He noticed that the light red marks are shaped like her veins, something that he found to be of concern. So he jotted down notes of his observation and quickly went back to his colleague, showing him what he wrote down. Both scientists became alarmed by the discovery, but knew not to risk what they have planned—they feared punishment on them. So they went over to where Renee was and began to carefully fill up two pints of the Tesseract serum in a large 2-pint bag.

Renee saw what they were doing and began to shake her head in a panic, whimpering “no” over and over until her whimpers escalated into frightened cries, something that the scientists were forced to swallow and place clamps on the cords to keep the serum from dripping. Once they got the two pint bag prepared and the cords connected to the bag, they unclamped the cords and allowed the serum to flow in the cords again. Renee began to panic and tried to move, but was still restrained by the straps that kept her trapped in this hellish nightmare.

She screamed again in pain when the serum entered into her veins, the light red marks around the needles began to darken in color to reveal outlines of her veins as the serum continued to flow in her veins, though her heart raced faster and her temperature began to go up by the looks of the temperature monitor next to her. This gave great alarm to the doctors as they listened to her screaming in agonizing pain, to which they turned their heads to each other with worry as to what was to come for the test subject.


	3. Second Test

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> S.H.I.E.L.D. receive a video from Centipede and find that the experiments have already begun; Coulson makes a choice to recruit an unlikely ally; and the Tesseract serum starts to take a toll on Renee when she sees an unexpected company of aliens...

On The Bus, at 1:30 a.m. before the crack of dawn, Coulson was in his office, drinking some coffee to keep him awake. Sleep-deprived and jittery, he didn’t want to rest for a moment until there was a breakthrough in the investigation. Agent Ward was resting on the couch with May in the passenger room, as Fitz-Simmons was in the research lab sleeping on the floors with pillows and blankets, and Skye was keeping herself awake at Coulson’s request to find any clues to help pinpoint his niece’s kidnappers where they’re holding her at. She nearly dozed off to sleep a few times, but forced herself to keep awake to continue on, holding an earpiece to her phone to speak to the team leader.

“Any updates yet, Skye?” Coulson asked through her earpiece and she yawned a bit, stretching her arms.

“Zip, captain,” she responded as she rechecked anything that she could have missed, “I tried to get into records of any airport that this ‘aircraft’ that picked up the stolen vehicle might have landed at or at least past by in the past 72 hours, but so far, I am finding none. I am checking at every hour, but nothing’s come up.”

“Keep checking, okay? I don’t want to sleep yet,” he informed her as he drank his coffee out of his “Best Uncle Ever” mug that Renee got him for his birthday.

“Coulson, mind if I give you something to say?” Skye asked him in a low tone.

“Go right ahead,” he answered to her.

“I’ll keep trying. I might not get what you wanted immediately, but at least I would have enough time to find where the aircraft went. Okay?”

“Fair enough.”

Coulson held his coffee mug as he was reading through some of Renee’s files, mostly consisting of her “A” graded papers from high school that she earned whenever she did research on S.H.I.E.L.D., interviewed him or any of the other agents, or whenever she was taking notes on the daily life of an S.H.I.E.L.D. agent on the Helicarrier. However, he noticed a comic book amongst the files and carefully put the files down to examine it. Upon seeing it, however, he smiled to himself when he read the title of the comic book: Issue #1 of _Captain America_ , very vintage and in very mint condition. He remembered how hard he and Renee were trying to find this one while collecting the vintage trading cards and comic books from the 40’s. He chuckled to himself that it had to take himself and her to pay for the issue, but despite being told to put it in a case, they would always read it as if it was new.

However, he remembered the day he woke up and found himself in the hospital bed on life support to keep him awake, with a tube down his throat to keep him breathing and seeing Renee reading the issue to him and alerting the doctor and his fellow agents of his condition…

 

_Inside of the hospital bed at headquarters, Coulson laid there with eyes closed and a breathing tube as he was being on life support. It had been days since he was wounded by the Asgardian that attempted to conquer the Earth with an army at his side. Renee sat there by his side and appeared worried for what was to happen to her uncle. She was wearing casual clothing that day, being that she had been plucked out of school to visit her uncle, as a couple of Level 8 agents kept watch for any aliens that might have decided to come and visit in a non-friendly way. The Avengers had already saved the Earth, but Renee was concerned for her uncle’s well-being. Nick Fury had told her that they are unaware of Coulson’s condition and they assumed that he was killed instead. He had to avoid telling her that last bit, being that she didn’t want to have triggered flashbacks of her father on his deathbed._

_As she waited, however, Renee had an idea to see whether or not her uncle would be listening to her voice—she moved her chair to be closer to him, grabbed his favorite vintage “Captain America” issue from his suitcase and turned to a few pages, where the Captain himself was fighting off Nazis and the Red Skull._

_“Uncle Phil, if you’re hearing this, I’m reading ‘Captain America’ to you,” she spoke to him in a low tone so that she wouldn’t raise alarm to the doctors before clearing her throat and began reading one of the Captain’s stories to her life-supported uncle, including acting out sound effects._

_She knew that, whenever they were reading “Captain America” comic books, she and her uncle would always act out the sound effects and use a few different volumes in their voices to act out different characters. It grew into a Coulson tradition, after all._

_As she was reading, however, Renee noticed that he was moving his head a bit and opening his eyes weakly and stopped, standing up. There, she carefully walked over to his side and checked if she was just seeing things. However, she smiled with joy before turning her head and quickly hurrying out of the room._

_“Doctor! He’s waking up! He’s waking up!” she cried out with enthusiasm as the agents, Director Fury while he was in a suit and sitting down across the way, and Agent Hill lifted their heads with surprise, while the doctor that was on call heard this and quickly rushed into the room as Coulson’s co-workers stood up and made their way to head over there as well._

_“Mister Coulson, I want you to move your big toes for me,” the doctor instructed Coulson calmly, “Do you think you can do that?”_

_He nodded a bit before doing as instructed, much to the relief of his co-workers and his niece, before a couple nurses rushed in and the doctor instructed them to remove the tube from Coulson and bring him up to recovery. There, the tube was removed carefully and when they found that he can breathe on his own, placed a nasal cannula on him so that his breathing would stabilized, and they began to carefully wheel his bed out of the room. One of the nurses had asked the group if any of them were family, to which Renee raised her hand as a response and followed behind the hospital bed and the nurses, while the other agents and Fury stayed behind to waiting in the waiting room._

_Once Coulson was transferred to recovery upstairs, Renee was the first and only to see him. She carried her bag and the “Captain America” comic book in her hands, to which he saw her and gave a weak smile at her. There, she sat next to him slowly and held his hand gently, careful not brush her fingers on the syringe on the back of his hand, as he turned his head to her with sleepy eyes._

_“Hey, Uncle Phil,” Renee softly greeted to him with a sad smile to him, not used to seeing him like this._

_“Hey, kiddo,” he hoarsely responded to him with a smile in return, “I heard you reading ‘Captain America’ for me; thank you.”_

_“I-I wasn’t sure that you were going to wake up, so I figured that I-I could read something for you in the meantime,” she spoke to him as she swallowed hard, trying not to choke up at the sight of seeing her uncle, “I thought you died.”_

_“No, I didn’t,” Coulson responded, slowly turning his head away from her and forward to see the TV a bit, seeing the Avengers on the news with a softly smile on his face, “I was in Tahiti. It’s a magical place.”_

_Renee looked at him with concern, fearing that he referred his near-death experience as Tahiti, yet also feared the implications about it. She then noticed a large gauze bandage on his left chest near his heart and felt sick to her stomach._

_“Uncle Phil… what happened to your left side?” she asked him quietly._

_“Oh that? It’s my badge of survival before the Avengers saved the day,” he answered again, minding the wound on his chest, “I just have a lot of strength like Captain America, that’s all.”_

_“You should have been called ‘Captain Coulson’,” Renee spoke to him with a soft laugh to him but frowned when her smile failed to maintain on her face, feeling the need to cry._

_This response got a chuckle from him, but he noticed that her lower lip with quivering a little bit and she looked down to hide her sadness from him. He then lifted his hand, albeit with his recovering strength for a moment as his hand was slightly shaky, and brought it to her shoulder. This caused her to look at him with grief at the sight of her uncle surrounded by monitors and his arms covered by patches and cords._

_“Hey, what’s the matter?” he asked her with an assuring smile to her._

_“I just—I…” Renee tried to answer to him with a slight choke in her throat, but couldn’t spit it out properly._

_“Don’t worry about me, okay?” Coulson assured to her in a hoarse voice before telling her as she looked at him, “Stay strong for me.”_

_“Okay, Uncle Phil,” she responded to him before carefully putting her hand on his again, a small sad smile appearing on her face._

_It only a few minutes later that the nurse entered into the room and requested to Renee to let her uncle be so that he would rest. Although she was hesitant to leave Coulson’s side, she agreed and got out of the room, leaving him to close his eyes and to dream of Tahiti once more…_

The next morning, Coulson was fast sleep on his desk, snoring loudly since the cup of coffee failed to keep him awake throughout the night. He did not hear Simmons’ frantic shouts through his door nor did he hear the knocking from Fitz. Instead, he was dreaming of Tahiti, just as he did the first time he rested since waking up. However, he was rudely awakened by Agent May when she kicked down the door and he sat up, awake. There, Skye and Fitz-Simmons quickly hurried into his office, for they were frantic and in a panic—and not in a good way.

“Coulson, Fury needs you immediately,” Fitz alerted to the team leader in a Scottish accent frantically.

“Good news or bad news?” Coulson asked as he stretched his arms.

“Well, the good news is that we now have identification of your niece’s kidnappers,” Simmons explained to him quickly, though neither she nor Fitz and Skye seemed excited about it, though Coulson perked up at her words, hoping to hear something good about the news.

“Bad news is that they just gave us a message to us… and you’re not going to like it,” Skye added with concern.

With that said, Coulson immediately bolted out of his seat and hurried out of his office, where his team began to follow behind him, though they knew that he would be in for a bad shock. As they passed by the interrogation room, the captive spy heard footsteps and rushed over to the room door, looking out at the tiny window quietly, watching the team quickly leave with curiosity. He didn’t bother speaking up, he was just watching them.

 

 

 

 

Once the team got to the base outside of The Bus, some of the other agents turned their heads while Coulson hurried over to Fury. There, the director watched with as the field agent was rushing inside of the base and over to him.

“Where have they taken her?” he demanded quickly.

“We don’t know right now, but they _did_ send us a message just right now,” Fury responded to him, something that Coulson furrowed his eyes on the answer, “You might not want to watch it, though…”

“Let me see it,” he demanded to the director, “If we need to know about them.”

There, Fury then nodded his head to one of the agents on the computer and hesitantly nodded his head, allowing the agent to play the message for Coulson and his team. They looked to the video screen in front of them, to which static came first before a fuzzy and slightly shaky image came on the screen. It was the woman in the flower dress, as Coulson recognized her from Hong Kong, though she had her arms crossed with a smug smile. He nearly fumed at her smug appearance when he found out on who took his niece, though Agent May had to keep him from trying to shoot at the screen in anger.

“Greetings, S.H.I.E.L.D., this is Centipede giving you a message,” Raina spoke stoically to the camera, focusing at the agents on the other side, “And you seem to have something we need. A while back, one of your little spies hacked into our site and stole valuable information from us. We believe that the little thief had stashed the information away to any of your agents, so that our plans to give mankind what they want would be found. Well, we took care of the problem for now. The little thief was brought in and we’re… making sure she’s comfortable. Would you like to see her?”

Coulson then feared the worst—could Centipede already killed her? He didn’t want to know. As Raina moved and the camera followed her, the agents gasped at the sight of a person strapped on an operating table, though it appeared worse than they imagined. They saw that the person had red and light blue Lichtenberg figures outlining her veins on her arms and a bit on her neck below her collarbone, something that Coulson grimaced about. Then the agents heard soft groaning and their stoic facades dropped to looks of shock, disgust, and worry.

“This is our guest, a Miss Renee Coulson, if you will,” Raina spoke with that smug smile on her face and crossing her arms in front of her, “We brought her because she stole the information and we believe that she gave it to you. But don’t worry, we’re giving her the… _best_ of our hospitality with the help of our new serum, made from smuggled Tesseract particles from your facility and powered up by iridium.” She then turned her head to the figure and spoke to her coldly, “Lift your head up, Miss Coulson. Say ‘hi’ to the camera, you’re on video.”

There, Renee weakly lifted her head up, breathing hard from the pain that she would be feeling from the torture and quietly groaning, looking straight at the camera with half-open eyes. Coulson gasped with horror and covered his mouth with one of his hands at what he saw—she had red and light blue Lichtenberg figures outlining her veins surrounding her eyes and expanding to her forehead, as well as dark blue eyes and red sclera. He mouthed her name with hurt, seeing his niece being in this state, though Director Fury was shocked himself as was the rest of Coulson’s team and Agent Hill.

“Return the… information to Centi… Centipede… or suf… suffer the conse… consequences for your ig… ignorance,” Renee breathlessly spoke to the camera, forced to read out some type of message, before groaning again and bringing the right side of her head back against the table, to which the camera returned to Raina.

“The clock is ticking, S.H.I.E.L.D., though we didn’t bother giving you a head start on it,” she spoke before turning her head away to off-screen, saying to an unknown person, “Do it.”

Then the agents heard Renee’s screaming in pain for moments, leaving Coulson in a state of anger and shock, before the video ended with a whine of static on the screen. Everyone was in a state of disbelief and shock, but Coulson felt enraged by what Centipede was doing to his niece, to which he had to storm out and into a nearby office, where he was about to pick up the nearest phone and was about to request for weapons when Agent Hill rushed over to stop him.

“Coulson, would you mind telling me what the hell you think you’re doing?” Fury demanded to the agent to which he was forced to look at him. His patience and calmness was growing thin, and he needed to act fast.

“I need to call in every weapons specialists that we have, every person on the computers scan and trace the source of the video being made, and I need interviews of scientists that were at New Mexico that were working on the Tesseract cube, see if they have either made attempts to drain the cube or have already done so,” he responded with anger flashing in his eyes, something that made the team concerned about, “Because Centipede’s gone too far with this. This is no longer a mission—it’s escalated to become war.”

“You’ll be endangering the lives of your fellow agents and your niece as well,” Fury then reminded him sternly, to which Coulson stopped at his words, “I know you have determination to find Renee, but we still don’t have location of where Centipede can be hiding in. We don’t know how many days or hours that they’ve have her captive, nor do we have the kidnappers. Right now, we can’t send in a team to go out to save her without finding where she is right now.”

“ _Then **I** will_,” Coulson seethed with rage when he leaned in to Fury, making the director shocked at his response, before leaving to return to The Bus. There, the team was forced to follow behind him, but Fury had to return to his post, trying to shake off the response from his head to concentrate on his job.

“Skye, I want you to get the video message and decode it, find out where it was taken; I want answers the second you find it,” Coulson ordered to Skye as she was walking over to his side, “We cannot waste one minute in finding out where they’re holding her.”

“You got it, Coulson,” she responded to him with a serious nod.

“Ward, May, scour for the kidnappers based on Hill’s description and bring them in for questioning; if they’re not being corporative, then feel free to kill them if you must,” he then ordered Agents Ward and May once they got outside of the base and heading to The Bus, much to their hidden shock at his words, “As for me—I need to have a word with Mister Spector.”

 

 

 

 

Inside of the interrogation room in The Bus, Spector was sitting down with his suit jacket off and slumping down next to him. He was reading the only book that was in the room itself, a book on Egyptian mythology, when he heard the cell door open and quickly closed the book. There, he saw Coulson walk into the room, not like his usual calm self and remained seated.

“You know, there are some situations where I might not need the help of someone like you,” the agent spoke to him, crossing his arms, “But it looks like I’m resorted to it.”

“Oh dear, is it that bad?” Spector inquired, trying to sound as if he didn’t care.

“Don’t even test me on it,” Coulson responded with an impatient scowl before he sighed and sat down to explain to him, “According to your files, you’re a former CIA agent with a background with U.S. Marines and mercenaries. It was reported that you went insane after a visit to the Egyptian ruins, claiming to have seen some sort of god.”

“Only because it’s true! I was saved by the lunar god Khonsu when I was dying and he has become my patron god,” Spector tried to explain to Coulson, holding his hands up in defense, “He made me his hand!”

“Well, I’ve seen and met gods myself—one tried to kill me,” Coulson stated before continuing on to explain, though Spector looked to him as if he didn’t believe him on it, “From there, you have claimed yourself to be of a few different people, one of them being a spy for hire, which got you into deep trouble, to say the least. I know we captured you and that the police will be arriving soon to handle your arrest back to New York, but until then, I want to give you an offer. And I hope you better answer.”

“Anything to help!” Spector answered to him, nodding his head quickly and eagerly, “I really need to make it up to you guys for my actions back in Berlin. Tell me what I will need to do and I will do it. Just tell me!”

“There’s a group that calls themselves ‘Centipede’, and they have kidnapped my niece and attacked the college she goes to, leaving some students dead and more wounded,” the agent then began to explain to Spector in a low voice, to which the captured spy listened closely and with furrowed eyebrows at what he was hearing, “They use serums to power up people that they think need it the most; but in my niece’s case, they’re using their latest on her as a form of torture, and we may not have enough time to stop them. However, you’re one of the few that can act as an enemy and have experience with dealing with mercenaries, which means that we would need your help.”

“You want me to act as a decoy for you guys?” Spector asked to see if he was hearing it correctly, “And to fight off any soldiers that might attack?”

“Here’s the offer: either you help us and you earn your freedom from this, or you stay here and let the police take you to New York in cuffs,” Coulson then offered to him quickly, “It’s your call, Mister Spector, but I need an answer in less than a minute.”

Spector swallowed hard at the offer, to which he thought about for a moment. Then he had his answer and looked at Coulson. “I’ll do it, sir,” he answered to the agent, “Only because I want to do the right thing. That, and I want to redeem myself for my mistakes in the past.”

“Good; when we find Centipede’s location, we’ll prepare you,” Coulson then responded to him before standing up to leave the room, “Just don’t change your mind when we leave.”

With that, he then left the room and closed the door behind him, leaving Spector to himself once more to read his book. Spector, however, felt a little lonesome, having no one else to talk to except for himself again.

 

 

 

 

At Centipede’s location, close to 11:30 p.m., the scientists had been reading over the notes for the second and third trials from after they were finished, though each one they read seemed to be worse than the last, much to their worry. They heard the subject groan and cry out in pain, though they were failing to keep the pained sounds out of their minds.

They read these notes that they printed out:

 

TESSERACT SERUM TEST

 

SECOND TRIAL

 

Subject: Renee J. Coulson

Age: 18 years old

Subject Status: Alive, expected to be deceased

Time: 8:45 p.m.

 

Subject has gotten ill, having temperature at 104.4 Degrees, and showing red and light blue Lichtenberg figures around eyes, on arms, neck, legs, and waist; eyes have turned blue and sclera appear red

Subject is conscious, yet is appearing exhaustive

Subject is conscious and reacting well to the serum’s effects

 

Ernest, PhD, and Dunham, PhD, are responsible for observing the subject and the serum. Subject is suffering from hyperthermia as well as having effects from the serum. Second trial amount is 2 pints (32 ounces). Third trial is expected to be 4 pints (64 ounces).

 

 

 

 

TESSERACT SERUM TEST

 

THIRD TRIAL

 

Subject: Renee J. Coulson

Age: 18 years old

Subject Status: Alive, expected to be deceased

Time: 1:30 a.m.

 

Subject is seriously ill, having temperatures above 110.5 Degrees, and Lichtenberg figures have darkened on parts of body

Subject is actively speaking and is fully awake

Subject is conscious and reacting well to the serum’s effects

 

Ernest, PhD, and Dunham, PhD, are responsible for observing the subject and the serum. Subject is actively speaking, fully awake and conscious. Quantity for the third trial is 4 pints (64 ounces).

 

However, they looked over at Renee, who was progressively getting worse by the minute. The light blue and red Lichtenberg figures have darkened in veins where they appear from her skin to blue and light blue while red figures began to appear on her cheeks and on her shoulders, linking from her neck and down her body. Her lips had been cracked dry and they were turning red from the figures on and around them with light blue figures going up from her chin. She was lightly groaning and moaning in pain with a slightly cracked voice, having screaming for God knows how many hours of being injected with the Tesseract serum. Her eyes had darkened to a dark blue while her sclera had turned light blue from the serum. She felt weakened and was beginning to grow tired, but she knew not to give up now. On the ground and next to the operating table, however, was the foul stench of vomit due to the high temperature within her body. The scientists had to block the stench from their noses on their own, though they worry that it would be too much for her to handle if they keep it up.

Doctors Dunham and Ernest looked to each other with concern for her, realizing that the serum isn’t giving her the powers of space as Raina assured them that they would—in fact, it was far worse than they could imagine.

“What should we do, Dunham? We can’t let this poor kid die by our own hands, this isn’t right,” Ernest spoke as he watched Renee lightly swinging her head from side to side in quiet groans and moans and heavy breathing, “It feels like we’re doing this for the wrong reasons.”

“But did you hear that woman when she first told us about this thing? She threatened us to be pumped with the same damn serum if we do anything to stop this from continuing, Ernest,” Dunham responded to him in a low voice, more concerned for his own neck as he watched Renee as well, biting his lip in conflicted emotions as to whether or not to do the right thing, “Kidding or not, I would rather not be a lab rat like the others. The test subject from Hong Kong, some man named ‘Scorch’, had his immunity from his fire powers removed by this woman and look what happened to him! He murdered one of the scientists and blew up both himself and the base in HK. Was he a lab rat like the girl?”

“I see where you’re coming from, Dunham, but Project Centipede is blind by their own ambition for some quick cash and hence rejecting to see the painful truth in front of us,” Ernest explained to his colleague back, “And it’s killing innocent lives, superpowered or not. We need to put a stop to this inhumane act and hopefully put this entire experimentation to rest for good. If we don’t save Miss Coulson from her fate, we would save those after her, then.”

Both doctors looked at each other before turning their heads over to Renee, who was still softly groaning with sheering heat within her veins, something that she found excruciatingly painful. However, when she was given a moment of peace from the pain and from the scientists trying to put more of the damned liquid into her, she finally rested the side of her head on the table, breathing hard with half-open eyes struggling to keep awake. She didn’t want to give up on her uncle and his team to hopefully find her and save her.

This was not to last.

Renee saw the entire world around her become ashes from a fireless flame, everything around her turning dark and freezing cold, something that caused her to lift her head with slight fear, not knowing on what was going on. Only she remained, strapped on the operating table by force and breathing quietly and hard. She found herself looking at the nighttime stars in the galaxy on a large rock formation, hearing inhuman cries close-by. There, she watched strange troops of creatures holding strange powered weapons on the rock formation, gathering to where a throne was located. Her heart raced again when she could recognize what the strange troops were—the aliens that invaded New York. Yet she did not recognize the creature that spoke to them, to rile them up. Renee noticed that he appeared human, but he wasn’t human at all, something that made her blood run cold and cringe by the pain.

“Our ally that promised us the Tesseract has failed to deliver it to us, and the Earth has protectors of its own,” the creature hissed them as he slowly paced in front of them with double-thumbed hands behind his back as Renee watched and struggled to keep awake and quiet, “The portal to Earth has been lost to us, and the humans refuse to burn. Our master had brought in that so-called ‘king’ with the promise of the Cube, all for nothing! Now _he_ will be forced to locate where our former ally is hiding from and we will see to it that he is given much more than just pain…”

The aliens screeched and screamed loudly in barbaric agreement, causing Renee to cringe from the loud noise. She just wished that she could move her hands so she would clench her hands into fists, to which the pain began to rise again. However, the creature stopped as if he heard something—to which he turned his head and found that the throne’s owner, another alien, stood up as if whatever it was sensed something. It turned around, revealing itself to have purple skin and uncanny glowing blue irises with an outfit of dark blue and rusted silver. Almost immediately, the “master” appeared to take notice of Renee, giving off a grin, to which the cloaked creature turned over to where she was at. She whimpered when the creature made his way over to her, with the “master” joining him and the alien troops watching with clicks and growls.

“The Tesseract, however, is not lost on Earth,” the creature hissed as Renee began struggling to move, the leather and metal straps still holding her down and still, “A piece of it is still there, though the humans have it within a body. Once they are foolish enough to allow themselves to drink the poison in their veins, then we will enter through them.” It then brought its hand up, to which she began to panic a bit, shaking her head at him, though the creature’s blood red mouth grinned wickedly and began to bring its hand to her temple. “Now then… Shall we begin?”

Then Renee began screaming in panic, violently shaking her head back and forth, squeezing her eyes shut, causing the operating table to slightly shake.

As it turned out, though she didn’t know, the scientists were actually trying to remove the leather straps off of her so that they would help free her from the operating table. They noticed that she was spacing off tiredly, but then she grew afraid when she was seeing something created by the effects of the serum and started to have a panic attack. There, the scientists tried to calm her down by using a sedate to knock her out, but they realized that it would cause more pain to her than she was already in. They also feared that the mixtures of the serum and the sedate would burn her veins from the inside. So they needed to be careful with calming her down as she violently screamed and shook her head side to side in panic with tears coming down her cheeks, trying to shake off the “aliens” away from her.

“Miss Coulson, please! Calm down!” Doctor Ernest tried to comfort her as he tried to get the needles out of her arms, “We’re going to help you out!”

“ ** _GET AWAY FROM ME!!!!!_** ” Renee shrieked at the top of her lungs as she struggled with panic and distress. To her, the voices were becoming distorted and warped—she thought that they were coming after her still.

Some of the workers of Centipede rushed over to see what was going on as the chaos continued on, as Raina approached the lab and called in security to hold her down and to cover her mouth so that she wouldn’t make any more of a ruckus. There, security guards entered into the lab and carefully held Renee down and covered her screams with their gloved hands, not sure if her skin would give off radiation by the touch. The scientists hurried over to Raina and they appeared to be shaken up by what had happened, something that made her eyebrow raise in suspicion.

“I thought I told you to keep an eye on our guest,” she stoically spoke to them.

“We are! But we found that there’s something wrong with the serum,” Doctor Dunham explained as he removed his glasses momentarily, “Not only is Miss Coulson suffering from extreme hyperthermia, with a temperature way above normal fever levels, but she is beginning to suffer from hallucinations and grow delirious from the radiation levels within her veins. The serum’s cooking her from the inside and, if we keep this up, it will practically kill her!”

“I agree, we were supposed to give her at least two trials of the serum and save the rest for when the black market wanted it as well,” Doctor Ernest added with a nod, though Raina didn’t seem to care at all, “We did not sign up to let a child die in our watch, nor did we not plan to give her a bloody overdose of it! If we keep doing this with her, and even with the future subjects, we could face serious blows to our reputation and criminal charges!"

“Double the dosage, and don’t think about telling me what to do—it’s for the good of Centipede, after all,” Raina responded to them as she turned away. Doctor Dunham fumed at her heartless response and sternly responded to her, “ **No.** ” She stopped and turned her head at him, raising an eyebrow, asking him, “Come again?”

“I said ‘no’, madam,” Doctor Dunham spoke to her, holding his ground, “What we are doing is sick, twisted, and damned inhumane. Want us to double the dosage on the serum? **_Do it yourself, you bitch_**.”

“Very well, you leave me with no choice,” Raina responded with a sigh before radioing in security. “Security? Come to Level Seven and deal with Doctors Dunham and Ernest. They’re acting up again.” With that, she gave them a smug smile and crossed her arms at them, to which a pair of security guards, having centipede-shaped devices on their arms and holding guns in their hands, arrived and aimed at the scientists.

“You were saying, Dunham?” she asked them with that smug grin on her face, to which they swallowed and began to reluctantly return to the lab. She then turned her head to one of the other soldiers and ordered to them with her smug smile faded from her face, “Make sure they do their job. If they make one little move to let our guest go, then you can shoot them.” Then Raina began to turn away and made her way away from where the lab was at.

Inside of the lab, the scientists excused the soldiers out of the lab, leaving Renee and scream and squirm in the table, though her restrained thrashing had begun to wear her muscles down to soreness and the amount of her screaming was beginning to do the same with her voice. They noticed that the serum within her veins is flowing quickly, an insidious glow emitting from her veins. Much to their horror, the Tesseract liquid was pulsing and beating with her fast heartbeat, almost in unison. They also noticed that she was sobbing with darkened tear lines down her cheeks, making the blue and light blue marks stretching down her face and surrounding her eyes appear much darker.

“We’re really sorry about this, Miss Coulson,” Doctor Dunham apologized to her as Ernest reluctantly moved to type of the report for the next set of dosage, “Believe me, this was not our intentions to do this.”

“Help… me…” Renee croaked with a choke in her throat as she breathed hard to avoid drifting off to a doomed rest and a few more tears coming down her cheeks, causing her to wince from the burn on her skin.

Dunham bit his lower lip and began to hesitantly grab a bag for 8 pints and began to carefully fill it up with the serum from the tank before hanging it next to the operating table. Both doctors looked to each other with worry, knowing the amount of pain that their subject would be after they give her 8 pints, which is something they didn’t want to give her. Nonetheless, with the pressure from the soldiers and the threat of being shot if they didn’t do what they were doing, both scientists had to be careful on what they do. Ernest heard Renee’s soft sobbing and inaudible wheezing as he shakily typed up the note.

The note read as this:

 

TESSERACT SERUM TEST

 

FOURTH TRIAL

 

Subject: Renee J. Coulson

Subject age: 18 years old

Subject status: Alive, expected to be dead

Time: 11:30 p.m.

 

Subject has grown worse, having a hyperthermia temperature of 144 degrees, Lichtenberg figures have darkened and spread on her body, and have developed hallucinations

Subject has become less active, struggling to keep awake

Subject is conscious, and reacting to the serum’s effects

 

Ernest, PhD, and Dunham, PhD, are responsible for observing the subject and the serum. Subject is actively speaking less, but is still conscious. Quantity for the fourth trial is 8 pints (128 ounces).

 

With that, Ernest printed it out and posted it before joining his colleague to start with the fourth trial, where they began to prep Renee for the trial. They had clamped the cords as they prepared the needles on both of her arms, connecting the cords to the needles, as they watched her struggle to squirm and groan. In unison, they slowly unclamped the cords, allowing the serum to flow and into her veins in her arms. When the serum entered into her arms, Renee began to scream loudly again with all her might in agony, her throat ready to give out and the Lichtenberg figures began to darken as the serum flowed in her veins.


	4. Rescue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With time running out and Renee's life growing short, Coulson and his team now find where Centipede is holding her and kick off a dangerous rescue mission.

 

Back on The Bus, as Skye was doing her best to decode where the location of the video was at, Agent Hill was outside of Coulson’s office in silence, holding Renee’s backpack that she had left behind when she was kidnapped. It was 5:23 in the morning, and Hill had to bring in the backpack that was found in the car, seeing that Renee had little time to retrieve it. She was told that some workers would come in and try to clean the vehicle to make it appear that there wasn’t blood from the slain agent from the attack. However, she also knew that it would at least give Coulson some glimmer of hope that he would see his niece again someday. As the agent was keeping track of what goes on, radioing Skye and his team for updates, he saw Agent Hill enter into his office, yet he kept his head down.

“Phil, it’s your niece’s backpack,” Hill spoke to him in a quiet voice, not wanting to upset him further. “It was in the car in the base garage.”

“Has it been examined yet?” Coulson asked in a low voice.

“No… I just… the other agents thought it would be best to hand it to you,” Hill responded to him as he looked up with hurt in his eyes, “It was left untouched for a few days in the vehicle.” She saw that he was still distraught over what has happened when he saw Renee in a state of pain and agony, to which she sighed and spoke to him as she sat down in a chair in front of his desk, “Look, I’m really sorry about what happened and, if I could go back in time or something, then I would try to avoid making the same mistake of letting Centipede kidnap Renee.”

“Don’t-don’t blame yourself, Maria,” Coulson responded, a choke in his throat as he had hold in his pain from Agent Hill, “None of us knew.”

“Is there any progress?” Hill asked, hoping to change the subject.

“Skye told me that she needed some type of code to at least get a verified location of the video’s source,” he responded as he stood up and walked over to her, “And Director Fury’s waiting for the right signal for reinforcements to send out to that location. Fitz-Simmons are reviewing the video, taking notes as to what Centipede is doing to her.”

“What about the kidnappers?” Hill asked as she handed him the backpack, to which he hesitantly accepted and brought it back with him to his desk.

“Ward and May called it in—they couldn’t locate the soldiers that you described them to us,” Coulson answered to her in a low tone, holding the backpack in his arms as he sat back down on the chair, “They just returned to The Bus. But I won’t give up on finding Renee, Maria. I don’t want to lose my best friend and the only family I have left.”

Hill looked down in silence before looking up at him with eyes that showed a growing pity. She was told to be stoic in her training, but with the growing anguish of her co-agent, it was hard for her to remain stoic anyway.

“I’ll be back at the base if you need me,” she spoke before turning and leaving the office for him to be by himself.

Coulson looked down at the backpack and bit his lower lip with a small choke in his throat, trying not to sob in case any of his team members needed something. He had to keep it in, but a small tear managed to escape and dropped down onto the backpack. He looked down at the backpack and began to slowly open it, hoping to give closure to his pain. Just seeing it, however, could make him go into mourning for the possible loss of his niece.

There, he pulled out his niece’s folder and opened it, seeing some of the assignments and papers that she had in it. Then he saw a graded essay and smiled at the grade she got on it—it wasn’t perfect, but it was acceptable. He remembered on how Renee would ask to do research papers on S.H.I.E.L.D., the agents and what they do, and how S.H.I.E.L.D. was important. Coulson also remembered how proud she would be whenever she got a positive grade on it, but he also frowned sadly, knowing that his brother would have been proud of her as well.

As he held the open folder in his hands, however, a small object caught his attention; Coulson raised an eyebrow at what he saw, to which he put done the essay on his desk and opened the pencil case that held it. He carefully pulled out a flash drive and examined it for a moment, not knowing if Renee had left it behind in her folder. Nonetheless, he put the folder down and put the card into his suit pocket, standing up and quickly walking out of his office.

There, he headed to where Skye was on her laptop, pulling out the flash drive.

“Coulson? Is there something wrong?” she asked him when she saw him approach her.

“Run through Renee’s flash drive on your laptop for me,” he spoke as he handed her the card. “See if Centipede had planted a bug of their own when they were making their new serum. If you have to, then double-check on everything. Do not overlook on anything minor, got it?”

“Yeah, got it,” Skye responded with a quick nod to him, receiving the drive and placing it next to her laptop so that she would hook it up to the main line.

“I will need a word with Fitz-Simmons, to see if they got any information on anyone tampering with the Tesseract Cube when it was in our possession,” he added before leaving her to do her work, to which she examined the flash drive for a moment and began to insert it into the laptop to start right away.

Coulson quickly hurried to the science lab below close to the garage and the entrance of The Bus, where Fitz-Simmons was waiting for him. There, they had finished examining the readings from video surveillance in the previous two years from when the Tesseract was first fished out of the ocean and studied, experimented on to make new weapons for “Phase 2”. It made him sick to his stomach when he began to parallel S.H.I.E.L.D.’s abandoned plans to use the Tesseract’s power for their own and now Centipede’s experimentations on his niece. But he had to keep it in and entered into the science lab to speak with Fitz-Simmons.

“Coulson, we got you just in time,” Simmons spoke as she and Fitz approached him, “We just found out that there was some tampering going on with the Tesseract while we were studying it. By the time of the Invasion, the Tesseract was at 80% power. Enough to make a portal, but not enough to make it bigger than the island of Manhattan.”

“Was it done by any double-crossers?” Coulson inquired, hoping to have some good news, after what was going on.

“That’s the thing,” Fitz answered to him, shaking his head and Simmons looked to him with concern, “We have spoken to the remaining scientists from the destroyed Joint Dark Energy Mission Faculty and none of them had connections with Centipede. Then we took a look at the security footage found from the underground lab before it was destroyed and made close-ups on the footage. We found that a couple of unauthorized figures had been ‘observing’ the Tesseract, but when we switched it over to infrared screen, then we found that the temperature was decreasing the more time they spent close to it, going to what it is now by the time it was destroyed.”

“Did anyone identify the unauthorized figures and why they were there?” Coulson asked, wanting more answers.

“No one knew _exactly_ who they were, but they most likely worked for Centipede even before the Avengers were formed,” Simmons responded to him with a sigh, “And they wouldn’t be the only ones to try and use the Tesseract’s energy for their own purposes.”

“Right now, they’re using the energy for the wrong purposes, all involving Renee and maybe the lives of other people in the future,” Coulson explained to them in light frustration, knowing that time was not on anyone’s side now, “The Tesseract’s not meant to be taken as something you can use to make a weapon or a serum. We learned that mistake, but Centipede’s going to make the same mistake as well. It’s important to know this.”

As he spoke, however, Skye quickly descended down the spiral stairs and entered into the lab, to which Coulson and Fitz-Simmons turned to her with confusion. She appeared dazed and urgent, wanting to give the news to him immediately.

“I ran through the flash drive like you wanted me to, and you definitely _need_ to see this, Coulson,” she alerted to Coulson, to which he nodded and began to follow her out and up the spiral stairs to the wall monitor next to the lounge.

May and Ward noticed Skye and Coulson heading to the wall monitor, with Fitz-Simmons following behind like ducklings before joining their teammates. There, all looked with surprise at what they saw: information on Project Centipede, codes being deciphered quickly, and files being opened on Skye’s laptop. Coulson, however, was the most shocked out of everyone; he now knew why Centipede had taken his niece, but didn’t know why she was chosen to be their prey.

“Literally found this deep within files of schoolwork, personal journals, and research papers that your niece has made,” Skye explained as Coulson walked over to see what went on in Skye’s laptop, “Based on codes that I’ve found on the Centipede file, each of the sub-files were downloaded and transferred over to her flash drive. That’s why Centipede had thought that your niece had stolen the information because of this.”

“Is there anything else from this?” Coulson asked Skye as he looked up at her, bewildered by what he found out on.

“Yes—the information also had matching codes for the video message that Centipede had sent us,” she responded as she rushed over to the laptop to show him once she began to type in the codes and bringing them on the map, “These codes are for not only the location where it was taken, but also on security levels in that location as well as well as Renee’s basic information as well. It went both ways so that they would know where she would be at, too.”

“Where are they holding her, then?” he asked again, his heart racing with anticipation.

Skye then clacked in the codes before coordinates were placed onto the map, where they were not in Arizona, but in the next state over.

“They’re in Los Angeles.”

“Okay, guys, let’s send the information out to Director Fury, let him know that we found the location of where Centipede’s holding Renee and send the request over to the Los Angeles unit for our arrival,” Coulson began to command to his team as he began to make him way out, “We will need to head to Los Angeles immediately with reinforcements on call to join us.” He turned to Skye before making his way out, “Good work, Skye. We’re going to need you still.” He then turned away and grabbed his walkie-talkie to hook it by his belt. He knew that he would have to be quick about it.

He made his way to the interrogation room and opened the cell door, stepping inside. Spector noticed that he was inside and remained seated. However, Coulson gestured to him to stand on his feet, to which he did, much to his confusion.

“It’s time,” Coulson then spoke to Spector before stepping forward to release him out of the cuffs. “There’s an outfit ready for you for when we head out.”

Spector looked to him with confusion, but his curious expression slipped to a much serious one, opposite of what he was like before. He shook his wrists and began his way out, to find an outfit waiting for him on the table for him. It was in black leather except for the silver S.H.I.E.L.D. symbol on the right sleeve of the black long-sleeved top and the crescent moon symbol at the center of the vest, to which it was white, surrounded by silver. Spector’s eyes gleamed for a moment for when he saw this and held it in his hands before looking to Coulson with a raised eyebrow. He thought that either the agent was daft into giving him an outfit like that or was a genius in knowing what Spector admired deeply. Either way, he had a mission to execute.

“We figured that you would like it,” the agent spoke to him with a shrug, though Spector accepted it and made his way back to the interrogation room to change.

“Thanks, by the way,” the spy thanked him before closing the door for some privacy and Coulson made his way back up to speak with his teammates as they were getting ready to make the journey to Los Angeles.

“Fury’s on the line for you, Coulson,” Ward alerted to him as he handed the phone over to him, “Better explain it to him.”

Coulson accepted it and held it to him to speak into it.

“Coulson to Fury, did you get the word?” he asked to the director sincerely.

“That your hacker found where Centipede is holding your niece? Certainly did,” Fury answered through the phone, “Agent Ward had also alerted me that you needed request for coordinates to Los Angeles, where their current hideout is at. We’ll send out some reinforcements to where you would be at when you arrive, so that they would seize the serum from Centipede’s hands while you and your team deal with getting your niece out of the building alive. The message’s being transferred over to the L.A. unit, letting them know of your arrival and why you’re there. You’re good to go.”

“We need to leave now, Fury,” Coulson responded, inhaling to hide any emotion from the director, “Time might be running out for Renee.”

“Godspeed to you then, Phil,” Fury then bid to Coulson in a sincere tone before hanging up.

Coulson returned the phone to Ward and headed into the cockpit to speak with Agent May as well, to let her know of what is to happen.

“Remember that spy that we caught in Berlin?” he quickly explained to her as he prepared a gun for things turn ugly, “He’s coming with us. We’re going to need his help.”

“You’re putting your trust and the life of a family member in a man that has different personalities?” she questioned him as she began to make preparations to leave for Los Angeles.

“No—it’s because he can _fight_ ,” he responded before checking the gas levels for when it would be in flight and leaving the cockpit to meet up with Spector below.

There, Spector had changed into his new outfit, having zipped up the leather vest and grabbed a pair of black leather fingerless gloves for him to wear.

“You ready, Mr. Spector?” Coulson asked as Spector made his way up the spiral staircase to join the agent’s team.

“As I’ll ever be, Mr. Coulson,” the spy-turned-agent answered to Coulson as he got to the upper deck of The Bus before adding to him, “Once I’m finished with my part of the deal, I’ll turn in the outfit, right?”

“Well, more or less,” Coulson answered as Spector sat down on the white couch in the lounge and buckled in, to which Skye took notice of him and sat down next to him. Coulson kept an eye on her so that nothing would happen to her from Spector, lest something was to go wrong. But he snapped back to reality once Ward sat next to Spector, feeling slightly uneasy being next to their prisoner.

There, Coulson turned his head to Ward, Spector, and Skye to let them know on what was to happen as Fitz-Simmons got their seats and quickly buckled up for the trip to Los Angeles to start up the mission.

“Ward, Skye, we’re going to need Spector’s help in this,” Coulson informed his teammates as the middle man listened silently. “You two, Agent May, Spector, and I will be met with backups from the Los Angeles base where we will ambush Centipede’s location. Not only will we seize what’s left of their Tesseract serum, but we’ll also get Renee out of there. We’re going to be split into two different teams—Ward, you and May will go with a team of specialists and fight off any pumped-up soldiers while Spector, Skye, and I will be locating where they’re holding my niece. Skye, you will handle with getting us through security when Spector dons a disguise to get the workers fooled. We have one shot at it, so let’s not screw it up. Both of you will go together when we arrive at the building; I will wait for when you guys give the signal for us to get inside. Got it?”

“Just one question,” Spector asked with a hand raised as if he was in class, “Can we give each other codenames?”

“Granted,” Coulson responded with a nod.

“Looks like all you will refer to me as ‘Moon Knight’, then,” Spector then spoke with a humorous smile, though Coulson looked to him as if he was insane.

“Let’s hold off on the codename thing until we make touchdown,” he then suggested, not in the need to play around for now.

After he spoke, however, Coulson heard his walkie-talkie go off. He had to answer it when he figured that it would be Agent May. Turns out he was correct.

“Coulson here,” he answered into it.

“This is Agent May reporting from the cockpit,” May stated to him as she was given the coordinates for where the location would be at. “We’ve been given approval to leave immediately and we’re making our way out now. Make sure you’re fastened into your seatbelts.”

“I copy that; I just went over the information with Agent Ward, Skye, and Spector,” he explained to her as she listened to him.

“So he’s understanding this, then?” she inquired to him.

“He got the gist of the plan.”

“Affirmative, Coulson.”

With that said, the team and Spector held on as The Bus began to move to taxi in the runway in order for it to prepare for a flight.

 

 

 

 

It was 6:45 a.m. in the Centipede Los Angeles base, to which Doctors Dunham and Ernest felt the barrels of the soldiers’ guns being pointed to them from the back of their heads, much to their unsure knowledge as to what would happen if they made a wrong move as they worked in the lab. Renee, however, seemed far worse still than the previous trial. The Lichtenburg figures had darkened on her skin to appear violet on parts of her body while blue, light blue, and red figures had expanded to most of the rest of her body. Her eyes were now violet with dark blue sclera and she appeared to be exhausted and extremely weak. Sweat was running down her body, her back, and her forehead because of the heat sweltering in her body, and she was breathing in a light wheeze with a croaked voice. She had been screaming with intensity that she had cracked her voice. However, she struggled to keep awake with the Tesseract serum fighting against her system and with more hallucinations of the aliens trying to get at her again. Renee didn't want to give up fighting the particles in her veins, no matter the cost, whether it was her body or her own mind.

The scientists were far concerned for her own life than theirs, being that they were forced to put in more of the serum into her body than what they supposed to put in. They saw how tired and close to death she was, and that her temperature was at an unnatural rate than normal. They wanted to help her out, but the need to do so was too great and the risk was far too much for them to be shot in the back of the head by the soldiers that protected them. For now, they had to wait until a miracle would help them and her out.

As they were typing up observation notes, the scientists overheard Renee groaning in a croaked voice, struggling to keep fighting against the sheer heat in her veins from melting her from the inside out, to which they became concerned for her well-being.

 

* * *

 

Elsewhere, Agent May was quickly driving an authorized vehicle with Coulson in the backseat, Ward, Skye, and Spector in the backseat, and a few more vehicles following behind them. Coulson was on call with one of the specialists from the Los Angeles base when they arrived, having already greeted them before making their way to where Centipede was holding his niece. He held his walkie-talkie in his hands and a gun next to him; he was hoping that his niece would not be in a body bag when they get to where they had her in.

“McCormick, thanks again for helping us with this,” Coulson spoke into the walkie-talkie for Agent McCormick, a man with dirty blond hair and brown eyes in a suit like him, in the vehicle behind them, “We appreciate the help a lot.”

“No problem, Coulson,” McCormick responded back through the walkie-talkie, “You would do the same if my daughter would be kidnapped. Except she’s younger than your niece and doesn't know about what I do for a living.”

“I went over the plan to my team before we left, so it looks like we’re going to have a steady time in and out of the building,” Coulson added as his heart raced with uncertainty for his niece’s safety, not knowing if she would be alright, “If things go well, then I will give the word for when we needed medical backup for Renee.”

“Copy that,” McCormick answered in affirmation before Coulson hung up the walkie-talkie for him to focus on the mission.

They were able to reach where the location was at, thanks to Skye’s GPS at hand, and needed to make sure that they wouldn't be caught by any of the soldiers that waited inside.

 

* * *

 

Inside of the building, the scientists were at an obstacle as to whether or not to help Renee out when she was groaning in pain and struggling to keep awake from her pain. If they requested to help her out, then they would be shot. If they didn't, however, then they knew that she would die from a slow and painful death. Either one would mean death for all.

Finally, Doctor Dunham was the first to roll the dice and to take a chance at life and death for him and his fellow scientist.

“Excuse me, good sir,” Dunham began to request to the soldier in a calm voice, “I need to check on the subject for a moment. May I please get up and go over to do so?”

“Make it quick— Clairvoyant’s orders from Raina,” the soldier responded with a sneer to the scientist as Doctor Dunham carefully stood up and hurried over to the operating table to check up on Renee.

There, he saw her groaning in pain, but she tried to get away when she saw him approach her, though he wanted to check on her temperature. Doctor Dunham then grabbed the thermometer from the table and began to put it into her mouth under her tongue to check her temperature. However, she was far too weak to try and resist as he was checking her temperature. Then he felt the thermometer heat up and he dropped it to the ground when it quickly heated up in his hand. Dunham grabbed an oven mitt close by the equipment and used it to pick it up to read what he got.

He grew sick to his stomach when he read what the thermometer got for Renee’s temperature: 300 degrees Fahrenheit; and forced himself to put the thermometer down along with the oven mitt to let the former cool down from the heat. His bones began to shake and his heart began to race with panic before returning over to his colleague, feeling ashamed of himself.

“Is there something wrong?” Doctor Ernest inquired to Dunham with concern over his friend’s reaction.

“The subject’s body—it’s at a dangerously high temperature, I fear that it’s cooking her from the inside out and melting her veins, too,” Dunham responded with concern in his voice. “One more dosage of the serum will put her out of her misery.”

“Can’t that woman do something about it?” Ernest asked with concern as well.

“She won’t listen to us, and neither will the Clairvoyant,” Dunham answered with a sigh of frustration, knowing that it would be too late for help to arrive to their test subject, “It’s just us now… and the soldiers.”

 

* * *

 

Outside of the building, Coulson held his gun in his hand and waited behind a nearby wall as he watched Skye and Spector made their way to one of the entrances with a soldier waiting outside with a rifle in his hand, waiting for any trespassers coming along. Spector had to don a dark jacket and a pair of sunglasses to cover up his new outfit for a while to get the soldier’s attention. Skye had also made forged papers for herself and for Spector for when they needed to be able to play their part. There, the spy-turned-agent walked over with Skye in his arm, catching the eye of the soldier.

“Excuse us, but do you know what this place is?” Skye asked, pretending to be curious with Spector smiling like a drunken goon.

“This is an official building, turtledoves, get lost,” the soldier warned them with a glare to them.

“Well, we were told to meet up right here,” Spector spoke when he showed his forged paper to the soldier, “We heard that there would be free food here.”

“For every person that gets to be tested for Centipede’s latest serum gets free cookies and juice—just like a blood drive,” Skye added to which Spector laughed goofily.

The soldier took a look at both of their papers before looking to them and turning to open the door for them. But as he was doing this, however, he was struck in the back of the neck by Spector, causing him to collapse at the door and slide down unconsciously. There, both Spector and Skye grabbed him and began to drag the soldier’s body away from the door and to a nearby hidden nook.

Once they had quickly removed some of the clothing, including the soldier’s helmet and his arsenal of guns, they then proceeded to the next part of the plan.

“Okay, Coulson,” Skye spoke to Agent Coulson on her walkie-talkie to give him the signal as Spector removed the leather jacket, gloves, and the sunglasses before putting on the vest and the jacket that the soldier was wearing, “We’re ready.”

“Copy that,” Coulson responded before joining them. He sent the info along to Agents Ward and May, who were with McCormick and a few more agents. “Skye and Spector managed to get the door distracted and knock the guard out. Now we’re going inside to continue with Step 1 of the plan. When we’re ready, we’ll give the signal to you.”

“Copied, Coulson,” May responded through her radio as she, Ward, McCormick, and the other agents waited at another section of the building.

With that, Spector used the I.D. card that the soldier had on him to enter inside of the building and opened the door for himself, Skye, and Coulson. They quickly hurried inside and began to make their way over inside a dimly lit hallway. Skye had an uncomfortable feeling about it—it reminded her of a horror movie that she saw growing up. She had to, without thinking, grab Coulson’s hand for protection, though he didn’t seem to mind at all. He needed the comfort, too, since his heart was racing with nervousness as to what was to happen to Renee if they arrived a minute too late.

Once they arrived to a room with no camera in sight, where it was decorated with weapons of all kinds—blades, guns, the works—the three noticed that the control room was guarded by two soldiers. Coulson had to examine if they were to be hostile or not, though he had to be stealthy about it. Though “stealth” wasn’t exactly his middle name.

Anyway, when he found that they were still at the door on guard, he pulled away and turned to Skye and Spector. They looked to him and leaned in slightly to understand on what he would say to them, in hopes that his plan would work.

“Okay, Spector,” Coulson spoke to Spector in a low voice as the disguised man listened closely, “This is where you and Skye do your part. You have the cuffs, right? Put them on Skye and act as if she’s your prisoner and fool the guards. Knock ‘em down or out, I don’t care, but make sure that she gets inside of that control room to knock out the security cameras in the building.” He then turned to Skye and added to her, “Play the role of Spector’s prisoner, but be quick when he gets the guards away from the control room. There’s one person inside of the room—do whatever you can to be in his seat and to knock off security cameras and alarm systems and to locate where they’re holding Renee. When you’re in, I’ll give the signal to the others. Got it?”

“You got it, Coulson,” Skye responded to him with a nod. Then she asked him in a low voice, “But what about you?”

“Don’t worry about me,” he responded to him with a walkie-talkie in hand, “I’ll be waiting for when the two of you are good to go.”

With that said, Spector pulled out a pair of handcuffs and put them on Skye’s wrists before pulling her away for their part of the plan to work. Coulson watched as the two of them exited the room and kept his walkie-talkie on him to give the word to Agents Ward and May. He knew that he would have to be careful when they’re proceeding with the rescue operation.

As Spector pulled Skye along by the cuffs, being that he pretended to be cold and cruel towards her and she had to act as scared and concerned. There, they began to walk towards the two guards in front of the control room, to which the guards quickly took notice of them and stopped them.

“Who is this, soldier?” one of them asked Spector as Skye kept her head down from them.

“I found the girl harassing my partner outside,” he answered to keep them occupied as Skye came a little closer to hide the key in the cuffs’ lock, “She was resistant, so I had to restrain her. Now I need to put her in a cell so that her folks would come pick her up. Any of you two know where the restraining cell is?”

The guards looked at each other with questioned looks on their faces, but they figured that since the soldier was new to the job, at least one of them would go and show him where it was. So the guard on the left stepped forward and began to get Skye by the cuffs to take her away. As he was doing this, however, Spector released his grip from the cuffs and curled his hand into a fist, coiling and making a swift punch at the guard in his face, causing him to tumble down unconscious. The other guard noticed this and was ready to attack. What he didn’t expect, however, was Skye kicking him in the groin and Spector knocking him out with a punch to the face.

From there, Spector grabbed the I.D. card that he had on himself to open the door to the control room once Skye released herself from the cuffs using the key, but he had to hand her a firearm so that she would be able to defend herself in case the man in the control room had a firearm as well. She held the firearm in her hand and opened the door to enter inside, Spector entering as well. The security guard snapped his head over to the side when he heard the door open and was ready to grab his gun, but when Skye pointed the firearm at him, he hesitated. There was no way that he would hurt her because she was not alone.

“Out of the chair,” she ordered as she pointed the firearm at him without any intentions to pull it away from him, “Don’t make me shoot you.”

He nodded and began to slowly rise out of his seat for Spector to move and put the cuffs on him, this time, keeping the cuff key on him so that the security guard wouldn’t have any bright ideas. Skye then moved to the chair and rolled over to the desk where multiple computer screens were up, showing black and white surveillance footage of events happening throughout the building. She took notice of one where a pair of scientists were being threatened by soldiers as a hostage on an operating table appeared to be dead… until she began to weakly move her head.

“Oh my God,” Skye breathed in horror as she saw that particular video screen and Spector joined her, “I think that’s her.” With that, she had to radio to Coulson, “Coulson, this is Skye and Moon Knight reporting from inside of the control room, we’re in. Now I need to knock off the alarms and most of the surveillance cameras so that they would go dark. Then we can get to the lab that your niece is at.”

“Is there a confirmed location of this lab?” he asked with hope rising in his heart.

“Yeah, it’s on the 3rd level, first five doors to the left,” she responded with as Spector held the walkie-talkie for her to do her work, “I hope you’re writing this down, A.C. Because we have to get to her quickly.”

“What’s going on?” he asked as he quickly wrote down what she had said to him, “What are you seeing?”

“It does not look good, Coulson—but let me just switch off the systems and you can give the signal to May and Ward.”

As she said this, she was able to hack into the systems, where she then began to deactivate the alarm system by punching in codes as well as most of the cameras, except for one: it remained on for status updates from inside of the lab where Centipede was holding Renee hostage.

“Okay, Coulson. You’re good to go.”

Coulson heard this and felt a part of the weight lifted off of his shoulder in relief, to which he brought the radio up and contacted the other team.

“McCormick, this is Coulson reporting,” he spoke into his walkie-talkie with newfound hope in his heart. “Moon Knight and Skye have cut off the alarm system and the surveillance cameras. You and your team may now enter into the building. The lab is on the third floor—but be careful of the soldiers within. They’re pumped with serums and they will not hesitate into burning us alive, so be advised when I tell you this. You copy?”

McCormick, May, and Ward heard this as they waited for the signal outside of the building, but they sent one of the other agents over to see if it was clear to go inside. He opened the door and signaled the team to go inside, being that it was clear to descend inside. There, they armed themselves with firearms in case anything was to go awry and quickly went in, closing the door once everyone was in and began to make their way deeper into the building.

“McCormick to Coulson,” Agent McCormick spoke into his walkie-talkie as they quickly ran down the hallway, “We’re in. Should we use the stairs to the third floor?”

“Affirmative,” Coulson answered as Spector got out of the control room and Skye was able to get the blueprints of the building from the computer in front her. “If there’s any soldiers waiting for us, let ‘em attack. We’ll pounce on them.”

Spector waited for Skye to join him before they headed out of the control room and Coulson was able to join them. They then began to make their way to the staircase where they would be met up by Ward, May, McCormick, and their team. They were given precautions to use whatever they can have to defend themselves from the pumped up soldiers that would try to attack them. As they got to the staircase leading up, however, Coulson had to swallow his fear and move forward. A quick prayer for his niece’s safety, and his own team’s safety as well, was enough needed for them to continue going up the stairs until they reached to the door leading to the third floor.

 

* * *

 

 

 

Inside of the lab, Raina entered in with a stoic expectation of the experimentation, looking over at the scientists as they continued to type down all information regarding their test subject. She had the same smug look on her face as before, which is what Doctors Dunham and Ernest were worried about. Renee had her mouth slightly open with a dried drool trail on the side of her mouth, wheezing with a struggle to keep awake from falling asleep. She had her head on the side and appeared to be dead—if it wasn’t for the light sound of wheezing from her lungs, she would be most likely dead.

“Did they do anything to help our little test subject out?” Raina asked to one of the soldiers with her arms crossed and a smug smile on her face.

“Dunham requested to check on her temperature, but that was it,” the soldier answered stoically as the two scientists held their hands in fear. “Neither of them have gone up to go over to the girl without permission to go.”

“As for our test subject itself?” Raina inquired to the scientists.

“She’s dying, Raina,” Dunham insisted with concern yet with a low hiss of defiance to her, though she raised an eyebrow at his tone. “She’ll be subjected to a slow lobotomy to her brain if we give her one more dosage of the serum and her insides are sure to melt in her body. Her skin will degenerate into the color of the Tesseract and she’ll go into complete cardiac arrest, by means to paralyze her. We have to put a stop to these experiments immediately.”

“The Clairvoyant did order a full test run on the serum, correct?” Raina spoke as one of the soldiers held his firearm at the scientist’s shoulder in case of orders, “He also mentioned that those that steal from Centipede would be punished greatly. So, when he found out that the two of you were planning to release our little lab rat into the wild, he figured that we would have to raise the stakes a bit. He mentioned that unless we do what we are told, then the janitors will have to clean up some messes in here; keep that in mind.”

“What if we want to quit?” Dunham inquired, as if he was tempting fate.

Raina said nothing except she turned her head to the soldier pressing the barrel of the firearm at Dunham’s shoulder and gave him a stoic nod of her head. Then a deafening shot was heard and Dunham fell to his knees, clenching his shoulder in pain. He was looking down the ground with his other hand on the ground, his lab coat being stained with red and his hand pressing against the wound, making it bloody as well. Raina, however, crossed her arms at him as he looked up with a face in pain.

“That’s your answer, but consider it a warning,” she responded with a smug grin, “Go further from that and you’ll have more.”

Dunham huffed before Ernest brought himself to head over to his colleague to help him back to his feet, keeping him steady in balance.

“Now then, give another dose of the serum to our little lab rat while the workers are bringing up body bags to the lab,” she added to them as they grimaced with wan faces and looked to each other before looking at her again.

Before they can go over to Renee to resume with the experiments, those in the lab heard some thudding and punches throwing, stopping in their tracks with confusion. The scientists became relieved when they realized that help had finally arrived, but Raina found the plans were falling apart. Renee heard the noises and weakly lifted her head before lowering it down again, feeling the heavy weight holding her down in pressure. Raina, however, had a bad feeling about it and made a call to one of the other soldiers to send in reinforcements and a copter to come pick her up since the building was being ambushed by intruders. Ernest remained on Dunham’s side as he grabbed a medical kit and began to press a packet of gauze against the wound for him to apply a bandage on him. The soldiers that were keeping an eye on them had to leave to attack the intruders.

 

* * *

 

 

Outside of the lab, Coulson and the other agents moved quickly, fighting against any coming soldiers that would attack them. When they were in the hallway, they heard a damning gunshot and Coulson grimaced in fear and began to worry that they had done a mercy killing on his niece. He turned his head to May and Ward and nodded his head to them, signaling them to go ahead and to deal with the soldiers ahead them.

“The lab is up ahead, Coulson,” Skye alerted to him as she used the information to give him and the others direction as to where to go.

“If that gunshot is any indication, either my niece has been euthanized or the serum’s decided to have a body of its own,” he spoke darkly, emitting an uneasy exhale at his answer.

There, the team made a quick charge down the hall as May and Ward against the soldiers that charged to them, until they got to where the lab was at. When Coulson saw through the lab windows, his heart nearly stopped in horror. He saw that Renee was very different than the video when she looked horrible—now she looked worse than before, and he feared the worst.

The scientists saw the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents storm the area in the building and finally gave a sigh of relief, their prayers for help have finally been answered. Raina, on the other hand, grabbed a nearby firearm and began to follow the soldiers out of the lab as some of the agents went into combat with the serum-powered soldiers. She turned her head to the scientists to exchange a glare to both of them before quickly going out of the lab, leaving them with the dying test subject.

Outside, Spector began to twist his opponents’ arms and made upward crescent-hooked punches when they were pulled to the ground. One of the opponents tried to strike at him, but he looked behind and used his other arm to coil behind into an elbow strike to the stomach before making a backhand strike to the face, causing the soldier to fall to his back with a nosebleed. He knew not to allow the soldiers to make a sneak attack on the team, no matter what.

As Coulson, Skye, and McCormick reached to the lab, one of the other agents kicked open the door leading into the lab and quickly entered inside. There, Renee heard the door kicked open and weakly lifted her head a bit, not sure if she was seeing things. Coulson, on the other hand, knew that what he was seeing was not a nightmare to him—it was really his niece. He needed to stay on track of his mission, however, before moving onto the mushy stuff later.

“Skye, I want you to stay with Renee, make sure that she is kept awake and that she doesn’t go into cardiac arrest,” he commanded to Skye as he handed her a firearm for her to use for her own safety, “I want her awake as possible for when backup arrives with medics.”

“Got it, Coulson,” Skye responded before moving to Renee’s side.

Renee saw her hurrying over to her side and was ready to panic with what’s left of her strength left, but Skye knew to calm her down.

“Hey, it’s all right; I’m with your uncle,” the hacker began to explain to Renee in hopes to calm her down, “The guys that busted down the door? They’re with him as well. Don’t worry, we’re from S.H.I.E.L.D. We’re here to save you.”

For the first time since her kidnapping, Renee no longer feared death and her eyes lit up when she was listening to Skye’s words. Her voice was broken and her strength was fleeting, but she never cared about it now; she wanted to speak and now she wanted to escape.

“Wh-what’s y-your name?” Renee finally asked in a croaked and broken voice, keeping her attention to Skye.

“My name is Skye of S.H.I.E.L.D., and you’re Renee Coulson, right?” she answered with a nod, careful not to cause any pain towards her. “Your uncle told me to make sure you don’t seize out before medics get here.”

Renee weakly nodded in understanding and Skye kept her hand on the firearm in case a soldier decided to attack her or the hostage. As this was going on, Coulson and McCormick were combatting the soldiers quickly as the other agents were having the upper hand. However, Coulson noticed Raina and his eyes appeared to have fire in them upon seeing here. Rage boiled within him as he raised his firearm and pointed it towards her. Normally, Raina would have taunted him on how he was too late to save his niece from the experiment; her smug smile slipped into an expression of fear and she began to run from him, to which Coulson huffed and chased after her. McCormick tried to stop him, but it was too late, being that he was already gone.

“Where’s Coulson going?” May asked as she was finished defeating one of the other soldiers.

“He’s going after that same woman we encountered back in Hong Kong,” Ward answered as he resorted to breaking his opponent’s neck.

“Her again?”

“Looks like it.”

As Raina ran up the stairs to reach to the top of the building, Coulson began to fire at her with fury in his eyes. He no longer cared about protocol—he was out for blood, having recognized her from the video and her voice when she made the taunts and commands from the feed. Although one of the bullets struck her in the shoulder, she was able to reach the top of the building where a helicopter waited for her.

“Hold it right there,” Coulson barked at her with gritted teeth and his firearm pointed at her as she stopped at his rage-fuelled voice. “Why… why did you do this?” he demanded, hiding his anguish from her as he was making steps towards her, “You claim that Centipede wants to make the world a better place, yet here you are! Making a damn guinea pig out of the only family that I have left! And, even if you did succeed, what would it be for? All for nothing… I’ve seen what the Tesseract can do and you haven’t. You could have killed us all because of your blind ambitions.”

A nearby soldier from the helicopter aimed his firearm at Coulson as he stepped out to get the bleeding Raina and to take her away. The agent sighed and lowered his arms, knowing that there would be no more bloodshed before turning away to check on his niece. He knew he needed to return to his mission so that his anger would go down. Coulson heard the copter leave, but didn’t care as he returned to where the third floor was at and to the lab, where medics arrived in time.

“Coulson, thank God you came back,” McCormick spoke to Coulson as two of the medics began to handle the Doctor Dunham’s wound. “The medical team arrived. Now we need to get your niece off of the table.”

“Let me handle it,” Doctor Ernest spoke up as he walked over to where Skye and Renee was at. “I’ve seen how the kidnappers done it and I… I have, unfortunately, made my part in the inhumane act, along with my partner. We apologize for it, Mr. Coulson, I hope you understand it.”

“At least you apologized,” Coulson answered as Ward gestured Skye to take a few steps back from the table.

“Get a space blanket and an oxygen mask over here—make sure that the blanket is very cool and quickly,” Doctor Ernest spoke to two of the medics as they listened to him, “Miss Coulson has a very high temperature and is at an extremely high risk of cardiac arrest. It’s plausible that cold temperatures will combat this. When we get her off out of the straps, make sure that the blanket is ready and fast.” They nodded as he brought a third medic to his side to help him out as well. He knew that he has one shot of it and fast.

Coulson then walked over to next to Doctor Ernest, watching to what he was going to do for his niece. Two of the medics, however, had a cool space blanket and an oxygen mask in their hands on stand-by so that, when the young victim is removed off of the table, then they would have those ready.

There, the scientist put on gloves so that he wouldn’t get burnt as he began to carefully remove the needles from Renee’s arms, emitting a weak groan from her burnt out throat, and required the help of a third medic to press the wounds up with bandages. Next, he began to unstrap the leather straps off of Renee’s arms, hands, and shoulders, revealing darker markings from where the straps on her arms before moving to unstrap her upper thighs, ankles, and waist, causing her to slide down a bit. One of the medics rushed over to her and began to wrap her in the blanket, allowing her body to cool down as the other medic put the gas mask on her for her to breathe.

Spector was the first to approach them and gently picked her up, carrying her in his arms as Coulson turned and walked over to his niece’s side. When Renee saw her uncle, she made a weak gasp and tiredly looked at him with dark blue and purple eyes.

“U-Uncle Ph-Phil…” she spoke in the broken voice before Coulson made a teary-eyed smile at her and gently brushed her hair a bit.

“It’s all right, Renee,” he spoke to her, smiling to her now that he knew that she was safe at last, “I’m here.” He turned to some of the agents and spoke to them, “Let’s seize the Tesseract serum and board it onto the Bus for Fitz-Simmons to examine it.”

She made a sigh as the team began to make their way out of the lab and downstairs to outside of the building with the two scientists in hand and some of the arrested soldiers in cuffs, as well. Coulson grabbed his walkie-talkie and began to radio to S.H.I.E.L.D. Back at the base in Arizona, Maria Hill and the other agents held their breaths for news. Nick Fury also waited, but he remained stoic throughout the entire thing. Then they received the news that they had hoped for.

“Coulson to Arizona base, we have some good news,” Coulson radioed to them as they had a sigh of relief, “Renee has been located and rescued, and the Tesseract serum has seized. We’re making our return immediately.”

Nick Fury made a small sigh of relief as those that were listening no longer worried for the worst, but he knew that the worst was not over yet.

 

* * *

 

 

In one of the vehicles to the Bus, Spector continued to hold the wrapped and masked Renee in his arms as Coulson sat next to them and May drove, Ward and Skye in the other vehicle behind them with McCormick and the two scientists. Coulson continued to keep an eye on his niece once they were reaching to where the Bus was parked at, noticing that she was struggling not to sleep, though he didn’t know why.

That’s when they reached to the Bus and the vehicles stopped, allowing the agents to step out of the vehicles to go over to it. Renee, with tired vision, looked up a bit in wonder when she saw the aircraft and Coulson took notice, turning his head to see her.

“Well, Renee,” he spoke to her as Spector carried her into the Bus, “Welcome to the Bus, like you’ve always wanted to go on it.”

“It’s s-s-so amazing…” Renee spoke feebly with her eyes looking at it and around in awe, a bit of drool coming down the corner of her mouth.

By the time they got onto the Bus, Fitz-Simmons took notice and opened the lab door for Spector as he carried her inside and, with Simmons showing him where to put Renee down, put her down gently on the table without removing the blanket from her. However, they had to make sure that she would be comfortable for examination when they return to base. Fitz felt a bit of heat emitting the moment he brought his finger to her forehead, finding his finger to become hot instantly. He shook his finger a bit before bringing it to a cold surface to let it cool down. Simmons took notice and gave him a pair of rubber gloves to avoid getting a possible burn before putting another pair on as well.

Once Fitz-Simmons were able to carefully apply a cool temperature with Renee’s blanket and patched her up to get her heart rate, Coulson made his leave to out of the Bus where he met up with the rest of his team and McCormick’s team as well. There, he made a nod to Skye to head inside of the Bus to keep an eye on his niece before turning to Spector.

“Well, looks like you completed your bit of the bargain, now I can complete mine,” Coulson spoke to Spector as the latter looked at him with a nod and raised his arms a bit up with his hands down, expecting to be handcuffed. Coulson, however, looked confused before adding to him, “Actually, I had a better idea. There’s a base in New York if you want to join the agents there. They’ve just opened a new spot.”

“Sounds like a good idea,” Spector responded to him before giving a nod to Coulson, “Thanks so much. Besides, I like wearing this new outfit a lot. I’m sure Khonsu is smiling down on you for your generosity.”

Coulson nodded before turning his head to McCormick to speak with him as well.

“And thank you for the back-up, McCormick,” he thanked the agent with a nod to him, “I don’t know what would have happened without it.”

“No problem, Phil,” the L.A. based agent answered to him, “We’ll keep in touch on your niece’s recovery. I hope that she gets better soon.”

Coulson nodded in agreement, though he was unsure if Renee would be able to get better in her condition before turning to return to the Bus with Agents Ward and May bringing the two scientists along and a few other agents bringing the seized serum onboard. Spector gave him a salute of respect before turning over to the other S.H.I.E.L.D. agents to start his return to New York.


End file.
